


Three Times Neal Ran (and one time he was found)

by magistrate



Category: White Collar
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Angst, Character Study, Chemical Exposure, Drama, F/M, Fever, Friendship, Gen, Hallucinations, Hurt, I Wouldn't Think Too Hard About The Tags If I Were You, Neal Caffrey Is Having Kind Of An Odd Day, On the Run, Probably Not Medically Accurate, Scene Whiplash, Three Things, Three Things (heavily reinterpreted)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-03
Updated: 2014-04-05
Packaged: 2018-01-18 00:14:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 25,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1407847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magistrate/pseuds/magistrate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are times when you can run, times when you have to run, and times when you'd better pray to be found.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Waking

(ii)

The crack of a thunderstorm rolling off the mountain slopes wakes Neal from a restless sleep to an empty bed. Sweat has pooled between his shoulderblades; it's late November, in the dark of night and still eighty degrees outside, and Kate has left the windows open to eke out whatever cool air the storm can bring in. The world feels shifted out-of-bounds of reality. But Neal is well-familiar with that, those hinterlands of sleep; good times to ply the power of suggestion, or, as now, to breathe and let the world cast itself into a new and unexpected form.

He stays there for a while, watching the gauzy curtains flutter in like ghosts. No light pollution, outside this window. No city lights, skylines lit up like Broadway acts, no wild architecture stamped in halogen against the rumbling sky.

New York is a long way away, but he never thought he could stay there forever.

The thunder is audible from here, but there's no rain outside the window yet. Neal gets up, hunts through the dark bedroom until he finds a pair of sandals, and heads outdoors.

He finds Kate on the beach, arms tucked around herself, staring out at the night-dark water; she probably hears him, but doesn't turn as he comes up behind her, wraps his arms around her and over hers, and lets her ground him. Years and years, chasing her and getting caught and tried and sentenced, living out his time in prison and then working with the FBI, working the FBI, dancing to Fowler's mad plans, and this – a cottage in the Seychelles, with the forested slopes to its back and the ocean spread out before it – this here is the reward.

"It's beautiful," he says.

Kate makes an affirmative noise. The waves toss themselves onto the beach, and she says "No one is coming for us."

Neal grins. They pulled a con to get themselves out here that turned a division of the FBI into their inside men. When you get law enforcement on your side, that's something to take pride in, surely. "Does that bother you?" he asks, nosing into the warmth of her throat; she smells a bit like the water, that clean salt tang, but there's a richness under it that's life and blood and skin. He can feel the flicker of muscle as she smiles.

"You're the one who likes being chased, Neal. Not me."

"Oh, come on. You had me chasing you for a good, long time."

Kate is silent, and lets the ocean answer for her.

He's silent with her, for a while; the heat of her body is distinct from the intermingling warmth and coolness of the air, and her weight, locked against his, is comforting. Feels like home.

"What are you thinking?" Neal asks, after a while. Kate sighs.

"I was thinking about that FBI agent. Burke." She leans back into him, and his arms tighten instinctively.

"Peter," he says, and dashes the first three thoughts that come to mind out of his mind. "Why are you thinking about him?"

"You said he got a two-week suspension? Because of Fowler?"

"Yeah," Neal breathes, and raises his head to look out over the waves. Saint-Exupery had a line about that – how love wasn't gazing into each other's eyes, but gazing outward in the same direction. Neal can take either form. "Which would put his first day back – well, that would have been today. He's probably still at the office."

"It has to be late, in New York," Kate says. Neal shrugs.

"Couldn't evict him with a backhoe and a three-man team."

Kate shifts her hand, resting it on Neal's wrist. "Think he'll be looking for us?"

"Hey," Neal says, "you said it. That bomb made our getaway untraceable – no one who examines that wreckage will believe we survived. And even if they did, what is he going to do? Extradite us for going undercover for OPR?"

"So no one is coming," Kate says, again.

"No one is coming," Neal confirms.

Kate lapses into silence again.

Neal holds on to her, but the first drops of water are darting across the beach and the storm is creeping under his collar. He's not shivering yet, but he can feel it coming.

"I have an idea," he says. "You come in, and I'll make torrijas for breakfast, and we can hide under blankets and watch the rain roll out over the ocean."

"Maybe I'd rather be out here," Kate says.

"In the dark, soaked to the bone?"

Kate leans back, and turns toward him. Her eyes have always been striking, and in the night, with the storm–

"It's where you are," she says.

"Ooh," he responds. "And if I were to go back in?"

"Then... I would have to follow you, wouldn't I?" Kate says. He grins, and she presses: "that's what you want me to say? Do you think I will?"

"Come on," he says, and tugs her back toward the cottage.

Halfway there, the sky opens up above them.

They make the last several yards in a run, laughing, Neal extending his arm over Kate and pretending that'll do anything to help her. They slip into the cottage under the yellow light of an outdoor lamp and Kate beelines to the stove, while Neal brushes drops of rain off his bare arms.

Kate fiddles with the stove and gets it to leak out an unhealthy-smelling gas, which sneaks into his nostrils like an unpleasant afterthought. He coughs. "Right. We'd better get that fixed." He walks up to Kate, tucking himself against her. "Okay, rain check on the torrijas. Fresh cut fruits?"

"Now I'm cold," Kate says, lips pulling into a moue. "I think you owe me coffee, at least."

"Oh, I owe you, do I?" Neal asks, though he's generally accepted the proposition that he owes her anything she claims he does. "I was the one who decided to take a walk in the rain?"

"Wasn't raining when I went out," Kate says. She puts her hand on the cool surface of the stove. "Coffee, Neal."

Neal mimes doffing a hat he's not wearing, and goes to rummage through the cottage's closets.

In one of them, he locates the construction-yellow toolkit left behind by the previous owners – the casual, everyday sorts of tools that represented a life spent with different priorities than any that had ever been Neal's. Hammers and screwdrivers; a wrench set; a tackle box full of nuts and washers, nails and screws; a cordless drill; a corded electric saw with a blade that had rusted red. He pokes and prods through it, memorizing the contents by force of habit, then carries it back toward the kitchen.

He really has no idea how to fix a gas stove, but he's learned that most things are simpler than people assume them to be.

Kate is standing at the kitchen window, staring at the falling rain with a pensive, troubled look. She's always had moods which changed freely, if not swiftly. She's always worn them on her face, for all the good it does an observer.

Neal's spent a long time watching Kate, learning the shifts, and it was Mozzie's influence that got him finding and remembering a line from one of the books he'd acquired in prison: _with something on her face like a mask – a thick mask, as though her face were the surface of the sea... it possessed not a single color but a multitude, appearing and disappearing and intermingling._ That had been a novel about exiles.

He draws up to her, setting the toolbox aside, and wraps her in his arms again. There's always been that urge, the bone-deep certainty that if he's _there_ enough, present enough, he can chase away whatever troubles she has.

These are some of the reasons Mozzie's always called him a hopeless romantic.

Then, Mozzie's not here.

The stove is still idly leaking, the gas scratching his lungs, and he says "What do you see out there?"

"We're going to have to run again," Kate says, voice all dark certainty. "We should already be running."

"What? Why?"

"You know why," Kate says.

A thread of unease travels up his spine, and he coughs. The chemical tang to the air, the fact that after running for years on end leaves you with a certain set of instincts, Kate's quiet insistence – something has him itching to flee, and he digs his heels in. No reason to run. "We're safe here."

"We're not going to be safe anywhere until this is over," Kate says. She presses her fingers into the glass pane of the window, a fragile barrier against the strengthening storm. Neal has the feeling that the storm isn't what she's talking about.

"Until what's over?" His arms tighten around her. "Fowler? The music box? It's done. It's–"

"Not that," Kate says, and turns. Her eyes are as striking here as under gathering storm: eyes to get lost in, eyes to never find your way home from. There's something else in them, now, though; something cornered and hard. She rests her palm against his cheek.

"It is paradise, though," she offers. "While it lasts."

And of course it can't last.

This is when it begins to slip away.

* * *

(iii)

One of the perks – or problems – with retirement is that Neal's mind takes the opportunity to wander.

Neal comes out of a daydream into the central Atlantic sun with a curious lacuna where the memory of the daydream should have been, like he's walked into a room and forgotten what was doing there. There's only the lingering aftertaste of may-still-bes and might-have-beens, and the vague impression of nighttime and rain.

Neal can hear rain, but the air is dry, and it doesn't sound like a Cape Verde thunderstorm anyway. Storms here blow in fast and come down hard, and this is slow, steady, the drops blurred into a kind of anonymity occasionally backed by a distant rumble.

He gets up from the lawn chair he was half-dozing in, and follows the sound to the sprawling library that Mozzie has repurposed as a bedroom.

True to suspicion, Mozzie's noise generator is set to some kind of rain – _Thunderstorm_ , maybe, or _Rain Pattering On Corrugated Metal With Blurred Traffic Noises In Background_ ; Neal tries not to pay that much attention to Mozzie's sleep accouterments for a number of reasons, foremost among them not needing to think too hard about what kinds of ulterior purposes they've been designed to serve. Mozzie has long vacated his bedroom and left the door hanging open in a kind of forced carefreeness, though Neal doesn't believe it for a second. Mozzie probably has cameras, pressure plates, and tripwires set up just in case someone finds their villa and walks in. It's a little intimidating, how quickly he adapted this place to serve as home.

But of all the places they could have ended up, Neal has to admit that he can't think of many better places than this one: beautiful weather, beautiful people, a villa that would be the envy of the kings of some nations. And more than that, it's a secure place, a safe place. That's the point of running.

Well. That's the point of running _from_ something. Running _to_ something is a different kettle entirely.

He finds Mozzie on one of the villa's balconies, reading a newspaper, with a chilled bottle of champagne at his elbow next to a bowl of citrus which looks more for decoration than consumption. "You know, I knew I should have looked up a list of this island's allergens before we came," Mozzie says. Neal raises an eyebrow.

"I'm surprised you didn't. Was there pollen on your window, or something?"

"You sound a little–", and Mozzie wobbles one of his hands. "Maybe you need more vitamin C. Orange?"

"I'm fine." Neal has to wonder if, in the absence of a wider criminal network and the US government and law enforcement – along with whatever conspiracies he's convinced himself are real and walking the streets of New York – Mozzie's finely-honed paranoia has expanded to take in the health of the people around him. He hopes not. Mozzie developing some kind of projective hypochondria sounds like it will make this little island adventure more trying than it needs to be.

He approaches and slides into the second chair, letting the Cape Verde vista spread out in front of him, all whites and blues and sun-reflecting greens. "I have to say. It's no Manhattan, but I could get used to this view."

"'How folly to have feared it,'" Mozzie quotes, without looking up from his newspaper. "'Not the best of all we knew in life can equal this; blending in one the sense of utter rest, the vivid certainty of boundless bliss!'"

It takes Neal a moment of shuffling through the reams of literature Mozzie has made sure to stuff into his head. "Mary Emily Bradley," he identifies, at length. "You know that poem's about death, not retirement, right?"

Mozzie shrugs. "Whatever."

"'The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty – not knowing what comes next,'" Neal counters.

"Ursula K. LeGuin," Mozzie identifies, whip-quick. "Come on, Neal. Not even you can be getting cabin fever this quickly."

"No," Neal says, too quickly. "I was just thinking. In another world, this could all have gone differently."

"Mm," Mozzie says, not impressed. "You could be serving consecutive life sentences on trumped-up charges as a slave to The Man in DC."

Neal shrugs one shoulder. "Or I could be a free man, collecting a paycheck from the FBI and working with you on the side."

Mozzie smiles. "You would make one hell of an inside man," he agrees. "Or, we could have run the instant we had the treasure. No Kramer, no Keller..."

"No goodbyes," Neal says. No realization that Peter would stand up for his freedom, that even Diana would have his back, when the time came, ready and waiting with a getaway car. He'd have gone without a blessing, unofficial as that final blessing was. A shake of the head and a trapped, angry look, smoldering just below the surface.

_Run._

"There are never goodbyes," Mozzie says, and his voice is sad and absolute.

Neal sits on that for a moment.

Then he laughs. "It's a beautiful day. Why are we talking about this?"

"Lingering ambivalence about your unplanned escape?" Mozzie ventures. "There was no other way. You knew that. Even the Suit saw that."

_Let's say you run from something, and leave someone else to take the fall. Does it matter at all if they told you to go?_

"I know," Neal says, and tilts his head back to the sky.

There's a cold breeze coming in across the ocean, and he can still hear Mozzie's noise generator going. He closes his eyes, lets the wind promise to take him back to that drowsy, neither-here state. Freedom means nothing to wake up for on a Monday morning, no schedule to hold him like the anklet held him, nothing but himself and this wide, wide corner of the world. He hasn't built a life here yet to occupy him.

"If there's one thing I know, it's that."

* * *

(   )

These are the things Neal's certain of:

He's running from something, and he's not the only one. His head hurts, his chest hurts, and his left leg _really_ hurts, but running on his leg and aggravating a fracture or ripping open stitches or whatever self-inflicted damage he'll do to himself is going to be less of an obstacle to his continued survival than being found by whatever has him on the run in the first place.

His immediate environment is dominated by concrete and asphalt, single-story buildings with barred-over doors, graffiti and a chemical smell he can't place. There's a chill to the night air, with rain sluicing down through the gutters.

He should have been with someone. Should have had someone to watch his back, should have been watching someone's back.

And he's alone.


	2. Searching

(i)

When Neal runs, he doesn't do it by halfmeasures.

In the nearly four years he's spent in prison, he's come up with eight different plausible escape scenarios, and another couple dozen which have no chance of working but would be a hell of a lot of fun to try right up until the point when the combined anger of several different branches of the US judiciary system crashed down between his ears. Until now, none of them have ever been worth the risk.

Kate's always been able to disrupt all his plans.

But Kate is gone by the time he gets to her apartment, a white-walled studio with exposed, dust-gathering pipes, yellowing blinds, and bare bulbs. It reminds him of the apartment he wrangled when he first came to the city, sweltering in the summer and frigid in winter, white and worn and impersonal. He wonders if that's meant to send a message.

Kate's cleaned out the place pretty well, but there's still detritus: a couple of abandoned house plants, their leaves not yet browning; her bike, some light fixtures, a couple old newspapers; his old, empty Bordeaux bottle, overfull with memories. He stands in the center of it, the bottle in hand, and tries to think more like a detective than a con. There are similarities, of course – both positions need you to get in the head of your case or your mark – but being a con, there's a certain framework, a specific endgame, and you can maneuver everything into that if you're good.

There's no framework, here. Just a mostly-empty apartment and maybe, if he's lucky, a clue to lead him on before the feds arrive.

He makes a circuit of the room, seeing where the dust has gathered and where it hasn't had time to. He opens up the fridge, thinking it's the obvious place to hide something – too obvious, unless Kate is going for obvious to make a point or shake a tail – but his fingers on the cool surface make him think of his hand pressing against a window, of Kate, standing on the other side of the prison glass, stiff and distant. There's always been distance – days between visits, the years of his sentence, the half-inch thickness of the glass in the visiting room. But not like this.

Something is wrong. It was wrong then, and it continues to be wrong now. Kate may have left the prison over a month ago, but she's left _here_ in the last couple of days. It's another disconnect in a world of disconnections: the hard look in her eyes, her body language, tense and held apart. She'd said "I have to go," she'd meant _I have to run_ , and if she didn't want him to run after her, she would have just disappeared. She's done it before.

So here they are, staggered in time and logistics, but running, again. Together.

As soon as he finds her.

Soon as he knows what they're running from.

All that's in the fridge is a bottle of white wine and a carton of chocolate milk, and if that's meant to encode a message, Neal's not sure what the message is. He commits the labels on both of them to memory, just in case; it's a Jacob's Creek Moscato and a Schroon River Organics milk, so there does seem to be a waterways theme, there. Slaves ran in rivers to hide their scents from dogs, New York City is dominated by the Hudson and the East River, and he's no closer to figuring this out.

He shuts the fridge and checks the most likely places he would hide something, but does it quickly; the floor moulding all seems attached, the outlet screws all look painted over long ago, the ceiling is plaster and shows no abnormalities. When that's done, he checks the street outside the window. A silver car that looks too nice for the neighborhood has pulled up down the street, but it doesn't look like FBI surveillance, and aside from that, nothing looks out of place from what he saw when he arrived.

By now someone will have noticed his escape, and the hunt will be on. There was no way he could have concealed his motive for escaping, and that means that whoever's after him – and it'll be Burke, he's sure – will probably be heading right here. It's time to go.

Even if he can't go far.

And yeah, staying in New York City is dangerous. It's Burke's home turf, his jurisdiction, and if he hasn't already put descriptions out to all the easy ways out of the city, he'll be doing that soon. But it's the last place Neal has knowledge of Kate, and the first place he has to start looking.

He's got a bottle, an inventory of a carefully-pruned apartment, and his wits.

He'll find her.

* * *

(ii)

Sometimes, Neal thinks the story of his relationship with Kate is the story of her disappearing, Persephone-like, only to reappear with the spring. As though this is the natural law of their interaction, of their world, and nothing he can do will prevent it.

Most of the time, though, he's not nearly so sanguine.

Kate is gone fast, faster than he would have thought she could get her things together and slip away from their little Seychelles cottage, slip _him_. But Kate doesn't do things by halfmeasures. Either her bridges are already soot or they're built like the Pons Fabricus, giving the impression that they'll never, never fall. Everything she does is decisive. Every action she takes, in the moment she takes it, is the one she's putting her full weight behind.

Him? Half the time, he doesn't realize he's breaking a promise until he's broken it. Saying _When this is over, we take Fowler down_ , and then he was on a plane, sailing over the Atlantic. Saying _I swear, Kate, I'm not lying – no more tricks, not on you_ , and then a brief mention of Copenhagen, ready to sell her on Jacobsen's statue of the Mermaid, on the Tivoli Gardens, with its arch lit up like a festival at night, on the Amalienbouge, with Alex and the music box and the three-person con nowhere so close to the tip of his tongue.

Saying, _Peter. I am not gonna run._

Yeah, the _not running_ has always been a hard part. But it's hard not to run, when something is chasing you, or when there's something to chase or it'll slip away for good.

Besides, his experience of promises has never worked out no matter which side he's on. Not many people make promises to people like him, and half the time the ones that do are lying through their teeth or can't keep the promises they've made.

In public, he and Kate have pretended to be a normal couple, hedge-fund Americans from some place in New England, rich enough to afford a place on the islands but unremarkable aside from that. The first thing a normal man would do when his girlfriend disappeared would be to go to the police, but the illusion is barely skin-deep and the concept of _police_ sets a skittering unease off at the corners of his mind. People like him learn to live without backup. Who's going to have their backs, in the end?

Instead he thinks like someone with a talent for vanishing: _Where would I go? What would I do?_

It'd be easier if he knew what she was running from.

They've never let themselves have pictures taken, which would be inconvenient if he couldn't draw her from memory the instant a picture might be useful; he packs a moleskine and a pencil and goes out to trawl the underworld of the Seychelles, the private charter boats, the rumor mills. If there's one thing he believes, it's that Kate wouldn't have vanished without leaving a trail for him to follow.

Sometimes, the thought occurs to him that the two of them are game animals, like rabbits or deer, who learned to communicate in flashes of signal before they ran. Every once in a while he lets himself believe that he's not prey any more, and then something comes along and shatters all his pleasant illusions.

* * *

(i)

Standing in the careful anonymity of no particular streetcorner, staring at the battery indicator of a ten-dollar phone, Neal thinks that if there's one thing to be said about New York, it's that your average bodega is God's gift to the working criminal. The selection of untraceable phones has certainly improved over the four years he's spent in trial and prison, and even knowing that he'll be trashing the phones soon didn't stop him from being tempted by some of the nicer models. But, no. The purpose of these is functional, not aesthetic.

At least, they'd be functional if the universe let them be. None of Mozzie's old numbers work – not that Neal expected them to, if he was honest; Mozzie's paranoia makes the paranoia of Russian governments look like vague concern.

Looks like he's going to have to do this the tedious and uncomfortable way.

There are a few ways to track someone: through their trail, through their activities, through their friends, through their enemies. Trail requires resources, activities requires intel, friends require trust and time. Which leaves enemies, which is a strategy Neal's never been comfortable with, but the situation seems urgent and Neal is sure Mozzie will understand. Probably not _approve_ , but hopefully forgive.

So, he dials.

The line rings for a good half a minute before someone answers, with a curt _"What?"_ that sounds Bronx true and sounds like it was designed to keep people from wanting to keep talking. Neal pastes on a smile, more for the sake of people on his end of the street than the guy he's talking to, and says, "Torrino's Pizza?"

The voice on the other end doesn't miss a beat. _"Nah, that shut down years ago, man."_

"That's a shame," Neal says. "I've been out of the city for a few years, but I really miss their Margherita shrimp."

Yeah, that passphrase is a few years out of date, but Neal is hoping that _been out for a few years_ will explain that. Though, after a long silence from the other end, that seems unlikely.

"I mean," he says. "I did a job out by Hunt's Point back in April '05; it's the kind of thing that tells well over a couple glasses of wine and a few good slices." He glances up and down the streets – no, no, nothing to see here, passers-by; just a young professional of no particular stripe talking to a buddy. Even if the buddy's probably itching for a gun on the other end of the line.

 _"You're the Hunt's Point man?"_ the guy asks. _"Prove it."_

"Love to. Tell you guys how I did it, too."

_"For?"_

"Information. Sightings. The news these days. Like I said, I've been out of the city for a few years."

There's some background noise on the other end, a couple more indistinct voices, and then the poor schmuck who's tasked with fielding calls from strangers says _"Tell you what. Come down by the Bon Bean Café over on West 40th. If you check out, we'll talk getting you what you need."_

"Sounds like a great afternoon," Neal says. "I'll be there."

He hangs up, scrubs a hand across his face, and tosses the phone. Right. There is a chance that this will end with him getting horribly murdered and dumped into the Bronx River, but if it starts heading in that direction... well, he used to be good at getting out of tight scrapes. Hopefully prison hasn't dulled that out of him.

The scrapes in prison are different, is the thing.

West 40th isn't too far from where he is now, and after a few feints down side alleys and false turns here and there, he marks a winding path through the city that he's pretty sure no one has followed. Which doesn't mean, of course, that no one's waiting for him there: there's a nice silver car illegally parked blocking a loading dock. One that looks suspiciously similar to the car outside Kate's old apartment.

_Aw, crap._

He's pretty sure he hasn't been made, but he backs away from the cafe anyway. Turns and blends into the crowd, letting his body language mimic the language of everyone else on the street, while his eyes and ears are looking for someone following his movements or a car coincidentally pulling out or a couple men in black suits throwing subtlety to the wind and closing in.

These guys are out of his network. The closest he's ever come to dealing with them was hearing Mozzie on a tear about how they weren't to be trusted, so how the hell does the FBI know to stake them? Or is this just some random spot of bad luck, them under surveillance for something unrelated to him?

No. Thinking in terms of random coincidences is never a good idea. Best case, it's true, but still lazy thinking. Worst case, it gets you killed.

He's halfway down the block when the silver car pulls out into traffic behind him.

Once is chance. Twice is supposed to be a coincidence, but the old rule on coincidences still holds true: people in his profession don't get that luxury.

_Twice is enemy action._

At this point, he decides the best idea is to run.

* * *

(iii)

The sands here on Cape Verde are gypsum-white, ocean-lapped, and they'll hold Neal's footsteps for a few yards before washing them away with the tide. That, he thinks, is more or less his life in a microcosm, but it still feels good to get out under the sun and stretch his legs.

Or, it should. He's barely made half his normal jog when he has to stop; he's out-of-breath already, and yeah, maybe Mozzie has a point about him coming down with something. He's still upright, still mobile, and it's not like he's even aching that much, but there's something at the corner of his mind that stays maddeningly just out of his grip and suggests that no, he might not know it yet, but he's never in his life felt this bad.

It's disorienting.

He angles himself back up toward the town, and lets the beach give way to stone and asphalt streets. Ends up, probably not coincidentally, heading for _El Cafe Isleño_ , where a drink and the most recent news mailed in from New York is available.

Maya's not there when he gets into the cafe, but there's an empty table and he sits down in it and sends a charming smile the other girl's way, and she rolls her eyes and comes over to serve him. "You look like a man in need, today, Señor Maine."

 _Sunk in sight of home_ , Neal thinks. "Caffè Americano," he orders, thinking the heat will chase away whatever's in his lungs and the caffeine will drive off the fuzz in his brain.

"Americano," the server says; she's fully aware of the joke. "Coming right up."

He leans back and takes deep breaths of the sea air. Can't seem to escape it, on the islands. Right now it's still novel enough to be intrusive; salty and cool, like fresh-fallen tears.

He's not sure why the first metaphor that comes to mind is such a depressing one.

Behind the counter, his server is pulling a long shot of espresso from an old and well-cared-for machine; she brings it out to him without a flourish, maybe because she's decided that he doesn't need any encouraging, maybe because Maya told her not to.

"You should be careful," she says. "Maya was here, earlier. She said a man was looking for you. Asking questions."

Part of him perks up, at that. A more sensible part files it away, warily, into the corner of his attention, and the rest of him hits the deck. "Someone from the city?"

"She didn't say."

"She have a description?"

The server shrugs one shoulder. "Just, 'a man'." She gives him a knowing look.

_You're trouble, New York._

"I'll keep an eye out," he says, with a winning grin.

She fails to be won over by it. Just walks back behind the counter and smiles at the next woman coming in.

There are only so many people who could be looking for Neal; fewer still who he'd expect to see in this tucked-away corner of the globe. Mozzie chose this place because it was all but forgotten, all but unknown, nowhere anyone in their business or from their history would find themselves of their own accord.

He breathes in the steam from the Americano, and wonders if it's just anticipation that makes it smell so harsh.


	3. Fraying

(iii)

There's no more news of the mystery man as Neal drinks his coffee, and when he finishes and buses his own table – always a gentleman – and walks out onto the streets again, he's turned over half a dozen possibilities and a baker's dozen responses to those, and he can't act on any of them until he knows which one it is. So: time to involve Mozzie, if it's time to do anything.

It's probably his imagination, but odd looks come his way on the streets. A sidelong glance here, an averted gaze there: people he's passed day by day who no longer have the curious wariness of locals regarding a wealthy newcomer but the edgy evaluation of those waiting for a storm to break.

Probably his imagination. That's what he tells himself, though he's not so foolish as to actually _believe_ it.

He's careful not to hurry his steps. Not to look suspicious, not to let it slip that his own gut reaction is turning unfriendly. No one recognizes you in New York. It's assumed anonymity: no one can possibly know everyone, so if you see someone strange who isn't obviously a tourist, you just assume they've been there forever.

Here, apparently, not so much.

Here, if he gives himself a reason to be noticed, he'll be noticed, remembered, and known.

And here he'd thought Mozzie had selected for a friendly population.

He crosses back from the main road, cuts through the fruit market, and starts on the way up the hill. Past the little shops that begin to fade into little homes, which grow steadily larger and farther-spaced as the road twines up toward his mansion. Here, opulence is space: wide yards, rambling houses. Set aside. No spots of prestige in the middle of the bustle, no high-perched penthouses with million-dollar views.

New York is a long way away, but he never thought he could stay there forever.

His mind almost makes it back to the city – he almost makes it back to the private road that'll lead him to this iteration of home – when he turns a corner and sees his face on a lamppost, black and white and red all over, smiling in a self-satisfied way with a caption that reads, **REWARD**.

* * *

(ii)

Two hours into searching for Kate, Neal runs into the same problem that's always accompanied searching for Kate: she's damn good at disappearing, and he can't just put up posters like he's looking for a lost dog.

Which leaves him casing the exits, the cabbies and the marinas and the airport, wondering who the hell he's supposed to ask and who the people are who sent Kate running in the first place. And maybe that should be obvious, but it isn't. Not to him, anyway.

Peter had been telling him that he couldn't think clearly, where Kate was involved. Neal hadn't listened.

Around the airport it's all white concrete turned gray by the night's rain, overcast clouds feeling hungover and slow, fliers for local attractions clinging limp to lampposts. Neal walks up to the entrance feeling cradled in the palm of the early morning, where the sky anticipates sun and the clouds stand ready to hold it at bay.

There's a man at the information kiosk, all photo-perfect to greet the tourists as they come in from whatever timezones they left at home. A three-piece suit and a million-dollar grin, chiseled features, bright blue eyes, and a look like the cat who got the cream. Neal stops up short. He seems awfully familiar.

A quick glance around the entrance says that Kate's not there; it's all couches and ticket counters and the security gate leading to the concourse. So Neal goes up to the kiosk. "I'm looking for a friend," he says.

Up close, the man who stands there isn't quite _all_ photo-perfect: it's early, yet, and he looks like he's been up all night. There's a haggard edge under the smile, and the smile looks like he put it on with the uniform.

But his tone is perfectly pleasant, in a way that raises the hairs on the back of Neal's neck. "Of course," the man says. "Arriving or departing?"

"Departing." It's a shot in the dark anyway, but if there is a right answer, that's it. "She was on the flight to..."

He lets that trail off; snaps his fingers a few times, like he's trying to remember. "New York?" the man prompts him – helpful, as expected. "It's the only flight leaving in the next few hours."

Neal almost forgets to act like that's jogged his memory.

Of course. It makes sense, in a way; New York is the center around which his life revolves. Seems like it, anyway. But Kate said, _We should already be running_ , and if you're running, why run straight back to the lions' teeth?

"That would be the one," he says, with a light tone and a grin, but he doesn't stick the landing. He can hear it in his own voice. "I was wondering if you could tell me if she's gone through to the concourse already."

 _If that's true_ , is the question. _If she's here, if she's going back, if that's the trail._ It makes too much sense, and too little.

But either way, the man gives an apologetic shrug. "Sorry. I don't have any access to that information. I could have her paged back to the security gate, if it's important."

Part of him wants to say _Yes, it is._ The other part knows that having someone call out her name over a PA is a good way to draw too much or the wrong kinds of attention. So he says "Thanks, but it's not that important. I just didn't want to miss seeing her off."

The man makes a sympathetic noise, or one he's angled to sound sympathetic. "It's always a shame to miss those connections," he says, and Neal has to fight the feeling that he's being mocked. "Is there anything else I can help you with?"

If the man was likely to be allowed past the security gates, Neal would have found a way to lift his ID. As it is, there's no point. "No, thank you," he says, and turns away. Time for a new plan.

Kate was the one making all the plans, from the beginning.

Of course she was. Kate is _smart_ ; she's quick, she's clever, and in his private moments, Neal thinks she's stronger than he'll ever be. He had a life of breaking the rules – small ones, larger ones, anything to get him through and then anything to get him _away_ – and she had a job at an investment fund that she picked up out of college and she was thrown into a con artist's life and she _flew_. Maybe not perfectly or happily, especially not at first, but she flew. And she's flying now.

Literally, probably, soon.

* * *

(i)

He's paused on a corner to catch his breath – more metaphorical than literal; he's in shape, ran every day in prison – when the payphone rings. If his life were a spy thriller, one of the ones Mozzie takes as unvarnished truth, he'd attribute some meaning to that.

Instead, he lets it ring and thinks through his options. Staying in New York is an idiot's bet, but it's not like he's been left with much choice.

Neal's pretty sure he's lost the silver car, but not so sure that heading back to the _Bon Bean_ is wise. Calling Torrino's men and admitting he's being followed, though, is a good way to get them backing off, and he's not about to stand them up without an explanation, so he starts thinking of ways to circle back around.

He's just headed down a cross-street when the payphone he walks past rings.

He turns to eye it, then glances up and down the street. A few turned heads, no real interest that he can see; he picks up the receiver, gives it a once-over, and puts it to his ear. "Hello?"

 _"Well, it took you long enough,"_ snips a voice on the other end, and even the interference on the old payphone line isn't enough to stop the shock it carries. _"When you worked for me you'd always pick up on the second ring."_

Neal cases the street again, pressing closer to the payphone on instinct. _Get ready to take cover. Don't let anyone hear._ "Mr. Adler," he said, pitching his voice light and friendly. "I didn't expect to be hearing from you. Ever again."

 _"And I thought prison might keep you occupied a little longer,"_ Adler says. _"I suppose we both underestimated each other."_

"Sounds like it," Neal agrees. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"

 _"You're a smart man, Neal, so let's not beat around the bush,"_ Adler says. _"I have business here; you and Kate are going to try to thwart me. I'm not interested in letting that happen. If you come to me now, we can make a deal."_

Something cold goes through Neal, because he's known for a long time now that Adler's a bit sharper, a bit more ruthless, than anyone gives him credit for. He drops the act. "Dammit, where is she?"

 _"I don't think she's really your concern at the moment."_ Adler's voice is flippant, but still hard-edged. _"So long as you're a threat to me, I promise you that I will burn you out of every last option, every last place you think to hide, until there is nothing left but a pile of ash and charcoal."_

"I'm going to find you," Neal promises. "I'm going to find Kate–"

 _"Good!"_ Adler almost chirps the word. _"Let's talk face to face. You know how to find me, Neal. I'm not hiding from you."_

Neal throws the receiver back onto its cradle before he realizes that he has no idea what Adler means.

* * *

(   )

For a moment, Neal thinks he's picking through wreckage. Then the world snaps into focus – focus of a sort, at least – and it looks less like wreckage and more like a back alley, a few wooden pallets here, some trash there, the rain insufficient to wash away the general grime and the smell of the city. He looks at his hands, which are wrinkling at the fingertips in the humidity; he looks at his clothes, which are soaked-through and somewhat out of order.

There's enough adrenaline in him to make him think he's been in a fight; a con or a heist wouldn't leave him looking like this. There's something else, too, but he can't grasp it.

Peter should be here, but he's misplaced Peter. Misplaced the FBI. On purpose or not, he can't tell.

It's all right, though.

It's not the first time he's been on the run.

He crouches down, his muscles and head and chest all protesting, and checks his ankle; no anklet, but the skin burns as his fingers brush the fabric over it. Enough to make him swear, but quietly, into the ambient noise of the rain.

_Come on. Think. What does this mean?_

He knows he's not firing on all cylinders – his mind is slow, clanking around inside his skull like it's navigating wreckage of its own. Thinks he has to find a phone, or get away from a phone; he was talking to someone, trying to meet someone, trying to find someone, trying not to be found.

All his thinking is contradicting itself.

He stands, and a rush of vertigo makes him put his hand out to the wall. A fragment of memory slices through his mind, hard and hot as a bullet, and without thinking he's pulling back, making his way down toward the far alley mouth. It takes him far too long to get there – a nondescript road (and come on, _think_ , it's never _nondescript_ , but his mind can't mark out what's significant and what's not, whether it's the distant blaze of halogen streetlights or the four-car width of the street or the oil-black pavement sparking with raindrops or the long windowless buildings that glower, flat and squat, like they're hunched down and waiting for a blow), dotted with trucks and the occasional car, devoid of human motion.

And part of his brain says _Run, you idiot, put as much distance as possible between yourself and this mess,_ and part of it says _You coward, you're just going to leave your partner behind? You're supposed to be in this together. Go back. Now._

 _We have to run,_ she'd said.

One of the cars is a car-length away and he moves toward it just far enough to catch a glimpse of eyes and anger. Sprints two meters back and ducks back into the alley on instinct, presses his back against the wall, holds his breath, listens for the creak of a car door, for footsteps.

There's nothing. And there was something wrong with the eyes he caught, the angle at which he caught them.

With his heart knocking in his ears Neal creeps back to the alley lip, and glances out. There's no motion but the falling rain, and as he edges back onto the sidewalk he makes eye contact with the person in the mirror of the car's surface, and breaks it just as quickly.

It's him. It's _him._

Red-eyed and bedraggled, hair peppered with debris and plastered down by rain, stubble and the harsh, distant light giving him a gaunt look that only plays up the expression of a hunted animal. What he read as anger would probably be better called desperation. He has to force himself to turn back to the reflection, because he can't shake the feeling that his mirror image is threatened, ready to strike out, attack.

Nice metaphor for the problem at hand, he thinks, disconnectedly.

Neal can't trust himself. He looks down, sees his hands shaking, and edges back into the relative safety of the alley; he's got no idea how he got here or where he was heading, doesn't know what he's been doing or what he's avoiding, and he looks like a junkie looking for a hit. He doesn't know if he's undercover or running or in trouble. All he knows is that he's off anklet, and he can't quite make a space for _anklet_ in his mind, like maybe that's all been a dream, a delusion, and he's waking up into the rain and if he approached anyone about it he'd be told _that's ridiculous, what, do you think your life's a fairytale? Friends in high places? Someone like **you**?_

_Got to be able to trust your friends. Where's that trust for you now?_

Mozzie's drilled it into him, again and again, that the worst place to be is _frozen_. If you're frozen, if you're paralyzed by choice, then the rest of the world moves without waiting for you, and the rest of the world won't be kind to you. Windows close. Nooses tighten. Wolves close in.

There's a reason people leave out _freeze_ from _fight, flight or freeze._

It's a lesson Neal feels like he's learned the hard way.

How, when, and why is the question he's left with, and he's afraid the answers are _Just like this, right now, for the usual reasons._ Maybe he should hotwire the car and make for Canada, but he feels like in his current state he'd drive it into the river and drown. His hands are shaking.

Besides, he has the niggling feeling there's something he needs to take care of, here.

"Don't suppose you'd know what that is," he asks his reflection, _sotto voce_. Then, like a bottle breaking, he finds himself laughing; desperate, side-splitting, throat-tearing laughter, pounding out like spilled wine or arterial blood, and there is nothing, nothing at _all_ , that he can grasp onto that strikes him as funny.


	4. Escalation

(   )

There's a long period of time when he's experiencing sound and shapes and colors and movement, but the first thing he _knows_ (can understand, can recognize) is the feel of wet pavement under his cheekbone. He blinks – there's water in his eyelashes – and pushes himself up, but gingerly. His chest feels like someone's put sandpaper between all his muscles and his bones.

He gets upright enough to put his head in his hands.

There's a car beside him, its front tire down low like a face bent to see if he's okay. He's pretty sure he's not, but it's nice of something to care.

Neal puts his hand out to the car's body. His reflection is cloudy and distorted; the street is dotted with cars, all still and silent for the night, or possibly down for the count. There's an air of abandonment hanging over this place.

Probably not a place he wants to be.

He stands up. Squints into the soggy darkness. Mutters, "It'd be too much to ask for these streets to have _signs_ , wouldn't it?"

Behind him, the long anonymous wall of a building is holding down the sidewalk. Neal needs to move, but he doesn't know what he's moving toward. He has a feeling he's not going to get there.

He has the disconcerting feeling that, from a car tucked somewhere in his memory, his reflection has peeled itself from the glass and is creeping after him.

"Work it through," he says, and his voice hits the wall, slithers off somewhere in the direction of a fire escape. "Wherever I am, it's right here." _I'm sick, I'm going crazy, something is wrong with me._ "What's going to be worse, staying out here and hoping I get better, or going to a hospital and finding out I'm headed back to prison?"

There's a third option. Maybe. Maybe he should find Mozzie. If he's run away and it's all gone epically wrong, finding Peter means finding jail, but Mozzie, he can trust. He's always been able to trust Mozzie. Mozzie's always trusted him.

Something jams into the back of his mind like a shard of hourglass and grit, and he amends that: _mostly always_. The thought doesn't introduce itself, though, so he's not sure where it's come from.

There's movement on the street.

Without thinking, he's running; down the side of the building, down to an alley, the world churning around him so by the time he turns the corner he's back on his knees again, stomach assaulting his lungs. There's a siren keening in the distance, like an ambulance with his name on it.

The fear is a clue, probably.

It'd be so much easier if he could just think.

The world is grey at the edges, and he digs his fingertips against the concrete. The sky is a jumble of cloud and light pollution, all the streetlights and headlights and lit-up signs and lonely lamps in windows smothered down by the oppressive rain. That means he's not _quite_ nowhere; he's still _somewhere_ enough that even on a clear night he'd never see the stars.

If it's Manhattan he's seeing reflected against the rain, that's as good a place to find Mozzie as any.

 _(Go into the light.)_ If it's Manhattan he's running from, it'd be a really bad idea.

And besides. And besides–

He turns away, looks back over the streets swimming in rain. Wonders how he'd retrace his steps, even if he wanted to. Wonders if he wants to. Wonders if he's meant to. What's the use of freedom if you don't keep yourself free?

What's the use of freedom if it's bought.

Neal turns his back on the city lights.

Mozzie likes to quote Objectivists and Darwinists, says that the strong and the clever survive, says that altruism is trumped by self-interest. Mozzie isn't great at following his own philosophy. Neal is kinda worse.

Still not knowing where he's going, he angles himself back into the dark and the rain.

* * *

(iii)

Like a metaphor, the clouds are rolling in.

Neal doesn't pause to appreciate the sky's theatrics. He ducks in through the villa's doorway, tucking the hastily-grabbed flyer against him like it's a work of art he needs to shield from the rain. "Mozzie!"

The villa is large; larger than it needs to be for two bachelors to get lost in. It's unabashedly ostentatious, but what else are you supposed to do when you have more money than you know how to spend? For a moment, though, Neal's not sure what he'll do if Mozzie has stepped out for a moment. He feels like if he has to search through the place, by the time he's finished on the upper balconies the sky will have cracked open, and the wolf will be at the door.

For a certain value of "wolf", anyway.

" _Mozzie!_ "

Fortunately for him, though, Mozzie meets him in the sitting gallery spread out at the base of the stairs. He's got paint on his fingertips and a glass in hand, and shoots Neal a quizzical look as he comes around the corner from the kitchen. "You sound alarmed, _mon frere_."

"Someone's chased us here," Neal says, planting the flyer on a table with the flat of his hand.

"Well, of course you're being chased," Mozzie says, giving the flyer a disinterested glance. "You're always being chased. Who is it now? FBI? NSA? KGB? IAU?"

"I–" Neal ignores the obvious question. With Mozzie, the obvious question is usually the one that gets you the least useful information. "Well, I'm guessing it's the FBI. The point is–"

"Yes, but are you _certain_ it's the FBI?" Mozzie asks. He sets down his drink. He picks up the flyer. Holds it up to the muffled outside light. "It doesn't seem like their style."

Neal's head hurts.

"Do you remember anything at all about the years I was on the run?" he asks.

"Well, yes," Mozzie agrees; "if they were going to put up wanted posters, that would be very them. Biological warfare, though. Now that you're mercifully out of the prison health care system..."

 _That_ question, Neal can't talk himself out of. "You think my sore throat has something to do with this?"

Mozzie gives him an even look. "You think it doesn't?"

Thunder rumbles outside. "Mozzie," Neal says. "Not helpful."

"You have to examine all the possible angles on these things," Mozzie says, and he's got his mentor voice on now. "Incorrect assumptions sink ships. And you've already gone and jinxed yourself, _Señor Maine_. It was friendly sabotage, you know–"

"Mozzie!"

"I'm _just saying_ ," Mozzie says.

Neal's head hurts, a lot.

He stops, rubbing at one temple with his thumb, and then gestures to the flyer again. "People have seen this," he says. "I was getting looks while I walked back here." And he feels like he remembers a group of men all standing up from their tables, a chase, a narrow escape, a run toward refuge. But none of that has happened. "We have to go."

A corner of his mind answers: _It was paradise, though, while it lasted._

"Neal," Mozzie says. "You can run at any time. I'm hardly going to stop you."

 _Friendly sabotage._ Neal can't believe he's hearing this. "Are you going to help me?"

Mozzie turns to the table, and picks up his drink again. "What do you need?"

Something is wrong here.

Mozzie isn't a _you can run_ or a _what do you need_ kind of person – not when the law is involved, not when the safehouse isn't safe. He's a _let's pick our exit strategy; here's three to choose from_ sort. Or, more likely, he's got one selected already and is handing out ghillie suits while everyone else is still trying to get their heads on straight. Mozzie, standing and sipping an island mojito while the city gets familiar with his partner's face, isn't _Mozzie_ in some fundamental sense of the name.

There's a rumbling coming from the sky, like the thunder doesn't know when to quit. But maybe not, maybe it's in his head; an auditory migraine, an intrusive line of sound like a plane taking off, like the rush of blood in his ears when he's running.

* * *

(ii)

The airport is small, but well-appointed; that's what a steady supply of tourist dollars will do for you. Neal is heading back toward the staff-only area, thinking of finding a locker room, gambling on getting a uniform his size to get him past the security gate. A little impromptu, sure, but he's done more with less.

Thing is, before he pulls that off, he sees the man who's beyond the security gate already.

Short sleeves on dark arms. Bulge at the back of the shirt like a pistol in the small of the back. Expression like a bulldog looking for a bull.

How the hell Agent Collins the bounty hunter has gotten involved in this, Neal doesn't want to know.

Collins starts to turn, attention sweeping the airport, and Neal makes himself suddenly very interested in the shelf of brochures by the wall behind him. He's not in his New York three-piece suit, and if Collins is here hunting, how many people in the world must have Neal's basic build and hair color? He keeps his ears alert, just in case.

But there aren't any footsteps except those going about their business, heading off the islands or settling in to meet the people arriving.

If it is Collins (and something seems wrong about that, displaced, with more than just the displacement of the man being _here_ instead of wherever else he could be), then Neal's just waiting for a bullet. If it is Collins, that's check, right there, trying for checkmate.

He picks up a brochure on the islands' nature trails, and uses it as cover as he turns back. Past the security gate, Collins is casually reaching toward a back pocket. Could be he's going for a badge or a passport.

Neal doesn't stick around to find out.

He's out the front door and there's the suggestion of commotion behind him, just starting up as he lets the door swing shut and dashes for the nearest spot of cover. If Kate's in the airport, that's one kind of trouble, compounded once over. If Kate's _not_ , that's two kinds of trouble, and that's not much better.

There's a weary quality to the dripping rain and a restless quality to his breath, and Neal doesn't know what he's meant to be running from, just what he wants to run to. And that, he can't – can't write Mozzie, call Peter, because he's burned those bridges himself; can't find Kate, because it's not just that Kate's not here, it's that he's fighting the rising sense that she's near at hand but behind blastproof glass. That, conversely, she's too far away to reach, and she'll always be.

But she's not here, and she's not too far. She's just running. It's just what their lives bring them back to, this running. There's never a way to stand still.

* * *

(iii)

Neal is pacing.

On the table, his face smirks up at him like the photograph knows something he doesn't. Someone came close enough to put that poster in Neal's path; how many minutes earlier would Neal have had to walk by, to walk straight into them?

The thought leaves a cold feeling on the back of his neck.

"It wouldn't be Fowler," Neal says. He doesn't know what became of Fowler, but he doubts it was anything good. "It would be Collins." _The bulldog. The bloodhound._

"Of course," Mozzie says, like there's nothing strange about that foreknowledge. Neal looks at him.

"Why aren't you helping me?"

Mozzie spreads his hands. "Hello? I need to know what you want me to do. You're the one going off and getting yourself targeted by rogue officers; _details_ , Neal."

Neal doesn't have any details to offer.

He stops, turns to the entrance. The road back down toward the city is grey and empty, and on the horizon, the darker clouds are gathering like a swelling bruise. He rubs his forehead, trying to think past the heavy atmosphere. "If Collins is here, then I need to find Peter."

"And how do you intend to do that?"

Neal turns a sharp look on Mozzie, but it probably reads as fraying or desperate. Fair enough. He's not feeling particularly together at the moment. But it feels like the natural order of things: he's chased, Peter is there at the end of it; he runs, Peter finds him; the rain rolls in, the wolves close in...

"He has to be on the island, Mozz!"

"And – what? My extremely well-connected information network has somehow missed an American tourist stepping off a plane and flashing your picture around?" Mozzie shakes his head. "Your faith in the Suit has gone from bewilderingly naive to alarming."

Neal rounds on him, a bolt of anger like a muzzle flash going off between his lungs. Because of _course_ Mozzie would torpedo that idea outright; of _course_ his friends won't trust each other, what kind of life does he think he lives–

But the anger is gone in a heartbeat. "I know him," he insists. "If Collins was on our trail, if he tracked us out here, Peter would know. He wouldn't just cut us loose, he'd–"

"He'd what?" Mozzie asks. "Fly to Cape Verde and smuggle us out on a charter jet? He's a _fed_. If he finds you, he's going to throw you back in prison." Mozzie watches him, like he knows the next words are going to shatter some pleasant delusion, but it has to be done. "He doesn't have a choice."

"Yeah, well, he's better than Collins." Neal steps around Mozzie, goes to the doors to the back patio, peers out. Collins had men in fatigues with guns, with him; he's not going to be subtle when he arrives. "Collins isn't going to take me in when he finds me. He's going to kill me."

Mozzie stares at him, eyes narrow and speculative. "Neal. You're a flight risk, but you're also the least threatening criminal I know. And that includes the twelve-year-olds in my training program."

"Thanks," Neal says, darkly.

Mozzie sighs. "You know what I mean. Never let it be said that I doubt the dark core of evil that lies inside every FBI agent worthy of the name, but they're usually not murderers."

"Yeah, well, Collins is," Neal says. "Or he can be. He's already shot me once–"

"What?" Mozzie demands.

Neal stalls out.

"Is there some part of your past that you're not telling me?" Mozzie asks, and Neal honestly doesn't know the answer to that.

Collins on Cape Verde. Their hideaway, their seaside villa, their paradise, burned like a bad alias. He's only ever run here once.

But his leg hurts, his head hurts, and he feels like he's just recently been caged. He turns to Mozzie. "Why aren't you helping me?"

"As I said, again," Mozzie says, but Neal doesn't let him finish.

"No." The air smells like aircraft fuel. The clouds above seem colder than Cape Verde's should. "You would help me. _Mozzie_ would help me."

Mozzie scoffs and gestures to himself, but the body he's indicating seems diffuse and indistinct. The sense of Mozzie without the identifying features. A facsimile caught in the corner of the eye. "I've purposefully expressed my genome to be difficult to counterfeit. You think someone, somehow, managed a successful disguise?"

 _Yes. No._ It's almost what he thinks, and at the same time, it's a borough away and that might as well be half the world. Neal's heart is going way, way too fast, and it doesn't feel like he's getting enough air. Feels like the walls of the villa are flaking away, and there's nothing between him and the sky. "I think you're _not here_!"

The words fly out of him like bullets, and cross a Rubicon just as well. The moment he's said them, he knows something has changed, and he can't go back again.

"Neal, what are you talking about?" Mozzie had looked amused – probably three parts amused to two parts skeptical – and now it's about two parts skeptical to one part cautiously ha-ha-I-hear-your-joke to another two parts completely my-best-friend-is-losing-it _freaked_. "I'm right here. I am literally standing right in front of you."

Neal notices that he's starting to hyperventilate, every breath asphalt-rough in his chest, and does his best to fight that down. "No," he says, because he can see Mozzie, right there – Mozzie and the heavy grey skies and the dim light on the railing and the city spread out on the green island, and he can feel the sea breeze but it's cold and the sun through the clouds is too hot and seems to be hitting his blood without passing through his skin, and the words in his mouth feel _correct_ even as they feel wrong. "You're not here. No one is here."

"Um, then how do you explain my _standing right here_?" Mozzie says. Neal shakes his head.

"I don't know." His blood is playing all the parts of an island band. It's deafening. "I think – Mozzie, I swear to god, I think I'm hallucinating in an alley somewhere in Hunt's Point and none of this is real."

Mozzie stares at him as the fear thrums in circles in his chest, and then something like realization dawns on his face.

"Oh," Mozzie says, and Neal's gaze snaps to him. He's not sure when he looked away, or if looking away has any meaning here.

Mozzie turns, settles back onto the bench, and turns a speculative eye toward the ocean.

"That," he says, "would actually make a lot of sense."


	5. Threat

(ii)

At least having Collins here makes things begin to make sense. A twisted sort of sense that leaves out the details, but now he's sure that Kate was on to something, and that something's going on in the airport here. He's worked with less.

There's also something niggling at the corner of his mind, like he realized something important, but now can't remember what it was. Probably it was a plan smarter than the one he's come up with. But the time is well past for sitting back and thinking about his choices. It's time to act.

The terminal isn't a large building; the Seychelles are a destination, not a hub. He makes it to the end of the building and turns the corner before the doors can fly open, and then he can see the high fence which corrals the runway. Razor wire at the top, and he didn't bring anything to cut it, but there's another way into the concourse from that direction if he's clever enough to find it. He likes to think of himself as a fairly clever man.

What, exactly, he's going to do after breaking into an airport is another question, but he's not thinking that far ahead.

Down maybe sixty meters or so, he sees a road sawed in two by a tall, rolling gate. The gate has its own adornment of razor wire, but there's a gap between the wire of the gate and the wire of the fence. A slim chance, literally. He jogs over to examine it.

He's always been happy to go for the slim chances. You don't get anywhere by playing it safe, right?

He takes handfuls of the fence, and slings himself up. Quietly as he can: there's not a lot of challenge in this part, though he does what he can to keep the fence from rattling. He gets to the top and gets his arm through the gap – it's not too bad, maybe eight or nine inches clearance, and he can get his fingers (carefully, carefully) along the blunt edge of one coil, pushing it gently but firmly away just long enough to propel himself over the edge and catch himself on the other side.

–and the wire catches him around the ankle as he does, biting in hard.

He almost shouts; twists and pulls his leg free with a tearing sensation that shoots up his shin and hits the bottom of his stomach. Drops to the ground, catches himself on his palms, and one hand closes on the cut.

There's not as much blood as there _should_ be, but the blood under his fingers is hot and thick as oil paints.

He almost throws up, there.

That wasn't elegant. He scrambles for the nearest cover he can see – a truck, probably maintenance of some sort – and presses himself back into its shadow, while the pain thrums up and down his leg. Glances out – there are doors back into the terminal building from here, but it's a matter of choosing which one to take. Hopefully one where someone clearly not in uniform, walking in from the airstrip, won't attract too much attention.

A quiet corner of his mind tells him _This is going to get you shot, and you know it._ He ignores it. Maybe he'd listen if it had anything useful to say.

But no. There's no motion that he can see, no patrolling security guards, and if the floodlights aren't on him from his trip over the fence, probably no cameras. He gauges the distance to the next truck, closer to the terminal building's wall, and makes a break for it; makes it, ducks into cover, and listens hard. The next dash – to one of the doors dotting the building's facade – goes as smoothly, though he's limping by the time he makes it, and his breath is ragged with the pain.

Should have brought something to tie off any inconvenient injuries. Should have done a lot of things. It's just, he wasn't expecting–

The nearest door swings open to an empty utility corridor, grey industrial walls, lights glaring like streetlights. _No excuse for unpreparedness._ That's a Mozzism, though what Mozzie sees as _being prepared_ Neal usually sees as _excessive_ and _somewhat disconnected from the realities of probability_. He closes the door behind him.

Seeing the airport from this side does nothing for its carefully-constructed veneer of tropical carefreeness. Neal is in fact, fairly certain he's been in warehouses and abandoned slaughteryards that looked cheerier, though just the one, on that last one.

He picks a direction and heads in it. Glances at the doors as he passes – maybe a storeroom here, maybe a broom closet there, hopefully a locker room _somewhere_ where he can pick up a change of clothes; be nice if there was a first aid kit somewhere, too. He's just about resolved to give up on that idea and sneak into the concourse when he turns a corner, and someone yells out, " _Hey_!"

* * *

(iii)

"Hey. Neal. Neal!" Mozzie is snapping his fingers in front of Neal's face, and Neal jumps and focuses on him. Mozzie looks exactly as annoyed as he usually does when Neal has betrayed his attention by being distracted by something.

It's equal parts reassuring and not fair.

"If you're going to hallucinate, you can at least keep hallucinating the most helpful of your imaginary friends," Mozzie says. There's a pause. "That would be _me_ , by the way."

In a better situation, Neal could have smiled at that. In a better situation, he'd probably not be hallucinating. "I'm not exactly controlling this, Mozzie."

"Well, obviously." Mozzie huffs. "You have better fashion sense than this shirt." He tugs at the Hawaiian shirt he's wearing – which really is an atrocity against garments everywhere. Not that Neal thinks that'd be enough to keep it from Mozzie's wardrobe, but he's not about to argue the point with a figment of his imagination. "You know I don't look good in CAT-shovel yellow."

"No one does," Neal says.

"So." Mozzie wipes his hands on the offending shirt, and gives Neal a pre-op look. "Let's work this through. Why don't you just – I don't know. Call me?"

"What?"

Mozzie rolls his eyes. "You have, so far as I know, no major psychiatric disorders, save your Suit-oriented Stockholm syndrome. I doubt you've recently taken up any recreational pharmaceuticals. So, having eliminated the exceedingly unlikely explanations for why you're hallucinating, whatever remains is probably plausible. You're in trouble, right?"

It's not like he can argue that.

"So, if you're in trouble, why haven't you called me?"

"I can't get to you," Neal says. "I don't know why, but I can't."

"How do you know?" Mozzie asks. Neal shrugs.

"If I could, I would have already."

"A pragmatic reason," Mozzie says, with a tone of approval. "Something is telling me that we need to exercise an unusual degree of caution in this situation. Who can you trust to get you out?"

Neal manages a dry, shaky laugh. "You always told me never to trust anyone."

"And you never listened," Mozzie counters. "Come on. List your assets."

It doesn't take a lot of thought. "You. Peter." That's punctuated by a rumble of thunder, like God is questioning his life choices. "That's pretty much it."

"Ordinarily, I'd prefer to be your first call," Mozzie says. "However, if it's brute force you need, the Suit may be your best option. He has the cavalry."

"I'd like the cavalry," Neal admits.

"And seeing as it was probably him who got you into this trouble in the first place..."

Outside, the thunder rumbles its assent.

"You know," Mozzie says, carefully, "there was a time you'd have told me all about this little case. I could have watched your back."

"You don't want to be neck-deep in FBI work," Neal says. _Any more than I do_ , he's about to say, but the words don't make it out. Maybe so, maybe not; he's had a bit of trouble, recently, telling what the hell he wants at all. Like he's expecting an answer on that point, he looks up, into the trailing edge of the storm.

And startles, like he's been dreaming that he's falling, and has to catch himself here in the waking world.

Something is screaming through his head, something about _Kate_ , how he has to find Kate, but the airport is an airstrip, but–

"Neal," Mozzie says, gingerly. "This isn't helping."

Neal blinks at him. "What?"

"You forgot you were hallucinating."

 _Oh._ He takes a breath to ground himself, which does the opposite of working: he can't tell if he's actually taking a breath, actually feeling the air come into his body, actually focusing his mind on anything real. Given that he's still seeing Cape Verde, he doesn't think he is.

At least he can recognize that much. "It's a lot easier, when you're here." Neal looks to Mozzie, then has to laugh. "I don't know. Maybe it's the conspiracy nut in you."

"Ah– _hah_!", Mozzie says, jabbing a finger at Neal's chest. "Now you see! What you call being a _conspiracy nut_?" He taps his own temple, then pistols his finger at Neal. "I call being informed and capable of seeing the truth. And now, you see the truth of that, as well." He crosses his arms, and his expression reaches at least an eight-point-five on the ten point Mozzie Scale of Smugness. "I just hope you remember this when you return to reality."

There cannot possibly be a correct response to that.

"Or _maybe_ ," Mozzie says, stepping decisively around the table, its poster long forgotten, "it's continuity. You did something wrong, here. You saw the past when it was supposed to be the present. You collapsed the waveform."

"Mozzie," Neal says. "Even when you're in my head, I still don't know what you're getting at."

"Collapse the waveform," Mozzie repeats. "Everywhere. Force your mind to confront the fact that it's not engaging with reality. None of this is real, so take advantage of that fact." The first scattershot drops are beginning to hit the balcony, and Mozzie's eyes are fixed on him. "How lucid are you in these other hallucinations?"

Neal gives an uneasy chuckle. "This is a really weird conversation, Mozz."

"Doesn't matter. Answer the question."

Neal reaches up to knead his forehead, then realizes that it's not _here_ that his head is hurting. If it hurts here, that can't be a good sign. Things keep bleeding through, ink spills across cheap paper, and he's losing the edges of where the spills begin and where they're supposed to end. "How am I supposed to know in one lucid hallucination how lucid I am when I'm hallucinating non-lucidly?" he asks, and then almost explodes into a fit of ill-advised laughter. He doesn't, but he can hear the hysteria dancing through his teeth. "What am I supposed to do?"

"Find me," Mozzie says. "Find the Suit."

"Kate," Neal says.

Mozzie stills.

Neal turns back to him. "Kate's in this, too. I don't know how, but she is. She's in trouble. I have to find her."

"Um, _you're_ in trouble," Mozzie points out. "Maybe focus on that, first?"

"Yeah, and when I take that advice, I end up–" _Too late to the airstrip_ , he wants to say. But he bites that down; if he admits to knowing that, he admits to knowing that Kate is really the least of his problems right now. Whenever now is, wherever now is, whatever _this_ is. That's not an admission he can make, not even to himself.

"Neal," Mozzie says. "You know what you have to do."

* * *

(i)

There's a ringing in his head. At first Neal thinks it's the payphone again, but then it fades. There's a certainty, nestled under his lungs, that he's surprised to find there, and he takes it out and examines it like he's trying to tell whether or not it's a forgery.

It's a bit early in the game for a move of last resort, but sometimes the way to win is to do such an end-run around the expected rules that you end up in Belgium while they're holding the line at Luxembourg. A part of him flinches at that analogy, but Mozzie's right, even if Neal can't remember when Mozzie would have told him any of this. He's got the confidence he'd have if they'd worked out a plan.

"Kate and I aren't the only ones out to stop you," he remarks, to the black plastic of the phone receiver. "Let's see if I can get a few more pieces in play."

He's on the run, but Adler went on the run long before he did. You can think you're a big name in the criminal world, and still run like a rat from the sight of a flashlight. And while the life is too messy for that _enemy of my enemy_ crap to ring true, sometimes, at the very least, the enemy of your enemy can take your enemy down.

Adler being involved means that this is already way over Neal's head. And Kate is involved, and Kate isn't an innocent, but maybe she's innocent _enough_ , in the eyes of the law.

There's a thick phone book tethered to the pay phone, and Neal picks it up. He has a feeling that he should already know what he's looking up, but feelings don't get him too far, most days.

The pages are fragile under his fingers.

Special Agent Peter Burke lives in a Brooklyn townhouse that Neal can get to by the end of the work day, even with all the trouble of concealing his tracks and misdirecting his trackers. There's a kind of giddy rush to the decision, like he's just about to go over a waterfall in a barrel, like he's just about to dive headlong over a point of no return.

It's a very _him_ feeling.

He takes a deep breath and makes his move.


	6. Action

(   )

He stops for breath somewhere where the rushing of the river sounds as expansive as the sea, for all that Neal can't see it past the impersonal buildings. He was heading away from the city, the city with its million-dollar views, the city with its Federal building and late nights and radius. The city where everyone will look for him. Now he's turned around, thinking of heading in.

He can't tell any more if that's a good idea, or just a good way to give up.

It's probably giving up. Or, like Mozzie puts it: to _take someone in_ is to con them or dupe them. You've gotta love the cops and the feds, then, who _take you in_ when they arrest you. It's all a game, win or lose, zero sum, and he's about to throw it.

Oh, well. Too bad, so sad; he's thrown the game once already, for Kate, and look where that got him. The big house, rent-free, for four years, but _after_ that, it worked out okay.

For certain values of "okay".

He remembers running from the police, which suggests he's not heading in toward Manhattan to get that life back. He remembers a flash of dark hair and another person going to ground, and if she's still on this side of the river, he should find her before he vanishes into some kind of Federal judgment day. But he remembers a conversation – can't remember _when_ that conversation happened; a storm was involved, but he doesn't think it was this one – with Mozzie, saying: _Find me. Find the Suit._ He's pretty sure _the Suit_ here is not an article of clothing.

So either the police thing is wrong – and, wrong or not, Neal's life is generally happier when he doesn't have to deal with the NYPD, and he doesn't _think_ that it's wrong, in any case – or he's got a dilemma on his hands. And not just that he doesn't know where to start on saving anyone.

To wit:

If someone breaks into a store to steal a burner phone, it's the police who get called, not the FBI. If someone stumbles into a gas station looking beat-up and half-dead, it's not an FBI issue. If someone sends up a flare, the FBI doesn't get that on their radar. FBI means rarified trouble, not the sort of thing Neal can get into at a moment's notice, and not the sort of thing that beats out the response time of the local PD.

What's he going to do? Forge a painting? Make it a rush order?

He looks up into the haphazard rain. Between it and the pavement and the pallor of his skin, he could do a credible Goya, he thinks.

He's grinning like an idiot, two beats away from bursting into laughter at his own unfunny joke, when there's no noise at all but it _sounds_ like a car backfiring or a gun going off, and his whole body jerks like he's been hit. He goes down on his hands and knees, almost his hands and knees, fingers splayed just barely above the cold pavement.

_It's nothing. It's nothing._

But try telling that to Neal's heart, which is hammering so hard he can feel it in his jaw. Try telling that to his adrenal glands. His body is convinced it's going to die out here, and his brain can't put enough together to keep up.

However he's going to get the FBI onto him, it's going to have to be fast.

* * *

(ii)

Neal pays no attention to the voice. Rather, he does; he just doesn't _stop_ for it. He walks faster.

Footsteps behind him pick up, and Neal takes a corner and then a door and then another door and finds himself in a stairwell, every step up feeling like his foot's about to snap off at the ankle. Whoever was behind him is chasing him, but that's not a surprise, is it? He's always being chased.

_(Who is it now? FBI? NYPD?)_

He pushes open a door at the top of the stairs and spills out into the concourse, and there's Kate, dark and uncompromising, with a hand on his chest. "Neal, stop. You need to run."

"I thought that's what we were doing," Neal says. Kate shakes her head.

"This wasn't what we planned."

"We didn't have _time_ to make plans."

Kate's expression scrunches. This isn't exactly how Neal pictured their reunion, but to be fair, he's never been good at predicting these things. "Are you an idiot?" Kate hisses. "Neal, don't get killed for me. I can make it on my own."

"We need to stick together," Neal says. "We can watch each other's backs–"

"No," Kate says. "No. We split up, we hide our tracks in the river, and if _one_ of us gets out–"

"Collins is here. I can't just leave you–"

"Neal," she says. "You're in a lot more trouble than I am."

That, he wasn't expecting.

"You need to run," Kate says again. "I can handle myself."

_Let's say you run from something._

He swallows, but his throat is dry. Sky full of rain clouds, and no moisture here. "What if I can't?"

"Don't." Her voice is suddenly, unexpectedly final. "Remember, you told me you'd teach me how to survive?"

 _Had_ he, ever?

A flash of lightning sharpens itself on the planes of her face. Face like a city skyline. Beacons in the dark. "Neal," she says, "I love you. And if I need you to save me, I can't be saved."

He registers the pain of that. "Kate–"

"You can't save everyone." Her hand finds his, twisting down as though if she holds on tight enough, their flesh will switch places, they won't really be alone. "You just have to trust them, sometimes. And you _have_ to save yourself."

 _I have to save you_ , is in his head. But he's never been that good at saving anyone.

"You'll slow me down," she says, and he has a feeling she's just saying it; a way to make him go, a way to push away. But what was his plan, really? Limp after her onto a plane, dripping blood and desperation as he went?

His hand curls around hers, clever fingers all. "I'll find you," he promises. "After–"

"Go," she says, and he leaves.

He leaves.

* * *

(i)

Breaking into Peter's house isn't hard.

The house has a couple of locks – good, solid ones, but not out of the ordinary for the area. The Burkes have a dog, but the dog is a little too friendly; he wags his tail and noses into Neal's hand like he isn't a stranger at all. And there's no one home. The place is drowned in darkness, the heavy, smoggy sort that clings to places too used to inhabitation and light and life to be left alone like this.

The place is _domestic_. He's not sure what he expected, but it's still a shock like a dislocation to walk in from the rain and find the kind of home people come back to day after day, fill up with sentimental detritus and casual clutter and the accumulations of lives that aren't pared down to what little can't be left behind and what little more wouldn't be a tragedy to lose. It's too much, for a reason he can't articulate, and he tucks himself down in the space between the couch and the coffeetable, hidden from the windows and not immediately obvious from the door.

This is a stupid idea. Stupid, stupid, stupid, but he's seen the way Adler blew up at Alex, and a sick, heavy pressure in his stomach is telling him that's not the worst Adler can do. And as for Burke, why the hell he's trusting Burke–

It gets muddy, there.

The dog comes around to his side – not the side between him and the door, fortunately – and sprawls out, leaning into Neal's hip. Too friendly by half.

Burke. Kate. Kate he can trust, or he has to believe he can trust, but there are too many questions there. He remembers Kate at the prison, saying _I have to go_ , and somewhere in there, he'd got the sense she was saying _You idiot, don't come after me_. And he hadn't listened, or maybe he hadn't heard, and he can't put his finger on her saying that at all.

This isn't the way it's supposed to happen.

The dog makes a mournful, agreeing noise, then goes back to his empty dog-grin, and Neal glares down at the top of his fuzzy head. "Yeah, what would you know?" he asks, and his voice sounds out-of-place and wrong. "You don't have these problems."

The dog's a dog. He sleeps on the floor and waits for his people to come home, and he wears a collar and never has to wonder who he can trust or if he's doing the right thing. No one ever chases him, to throw him in prison or destroy him some other way.

No one ever runs from him, either.

 _Must be nice_ , Neal thinks, and shifts away from the weight and the warmth. The dog just slides down a little bit more, and puts his chin in Neal's lap. Neal resigns himself to the indignity.

It's dark, made darker by the clouds dripping down on Brooklyn, and Neal can't track time as well as he usually can. It's slippery, like everything. He catches himself looking for the clock on the wall, thinking, _Why the hell aren't you here?_ and _It's late; what could possibly be important enough to keep you from home?_ , thinking _What's a con man have to do to get some attention, around here?_

Other people and their other, not-broken lives.

He's just beginning to rise, stretch out his legs – one is threatening to cramp, and damn, but he _must_ have lost his edge in prison for that – when the knob on the front door turns, and he freezes in a ready crouch. The door eases open and there's the man himself, briefcase in hand, wearing a wool coat the color of asphalt scattered with rain.

Peter reaches for the light and Neal rushes him; Peter turns and he has Peter against a wall, knuckles twisted in a utilitarian suit shirt. "Listen," he hisses, not entirely voiced; it's dark in the room and he doesn't want to break the silence, much as he has to. "Hear me out."

He's expecting something – recognition, maybe, or rapport – but Peter just doesn't look like he can buy what he's seeing. "What the – Neal _Caffrey_?"

 _Oh, goddamnit_ , Neal thinks. This is wrong. It's all wrong.

"Let go of me," Peter says.

It's a stupid idea, but those are all Neal is having, tonight. He does.

"And step back." Peter waits for him to comply, then smooths down his shirt; Neal can see the outline of a shoulder holster, but Peter seems more annoyed than threatened.

Neal can't even tell if he's feeling threatened. All he can hear is the rain, the rain, the rain.

"Okay," Peter says, and sets the briefcase down. His eyes are narrow, his body language solid like a prison wall. "Help me see how this makes sense. You escape from a maximum-security prison _two months_ before your sentence is up, you run, and then you show up in my _house_?"

It doesn't make sense; that's the problem. Everything that's made sense is up in flames. Neal lets his head drop forward, his shoulders slump – just a bit, just enough to let the exhaustion roll off him, just enough so he can breathe. "I need your help."

Peter raises an eyebrow, at that. "You turning yourself in?"

"Yes." Maybe. Maybe that will solve this. Or– "–no. I don't know." He walks to the couch and drops into it, and Peter's eyebrows raise another millimeter or so. "Something's wrong, Peter, and you're the only one I can turn to."

Peter chews on that, and Neal drops his head into his hands. Drags his fingers through his hair.

"Someone after you?" Peter asks.

Neal drops his hands, and looks up, again. Lets his eyes track across the wall behind Peter – the shelves, everything just as he remembers it; the pictures on the stairwell behind him. He knows, even without being able to make out the shapes in the dark, what they're of; knows which one will be Peter with that incriminating ring, that old invitation to jump to conclusions. Trip and sprain his ankle, bruise his palms on the way to conclusions. He can't remember what the conclusions were. "Yeah, maybe."

Peter narrows his eyes. "I can protect you."

Neal swallows. "I know." And he thinks, _so why don't you?_

Peter's staring at him, and Neal can guess why: none of this makes a damn bit of sense to him, and he's been chasing Neal for too many years to have that many surprises coming out of left field. He doesn't get that it's not chasing him that makes it make sense, it's what happens after Neal's not running any more. "I'm going to take you in."

"To the FBI." Neal starts nodding. "Right." _Pis aller_ ; when there are no options left, that's where he has to end up.

Peter reaches for his cuffs. They glint in the street light filtering through the curtains, and Neal jumps up like a gun's gone off. Peter stops moving, like he's dealing with an animal he doesn't want to startle.

"No cuffs," Neal says. His mouth is engine-dry; his tongue feels asphalt-rough.

He trusts Peter. He trusts Peter to cuff him and bring him in. But in the dark room, in the unreal light, he doesn't trust the cuffs, those specific cuffs, the cuffs in Peter's hands.

"Caffrey," Peter begins.

"Peter," he says. "I swear to you, I'm not resisting arrest. But if you put those on me, I'm dead. I'm _dead_."

"Why?" Peter asks, and the cuffs don't leave his hand.

"I don't know," Neal says, "but you have to trust me."

Peter raises the cuffs as though to make a point. "You're a convicted felon and a fleeing, escaped prisoner. Tell me why I have to trust you."

"I'm standing in your livingroom," Neal pleads. "I'm not fleeing."

None of this is right.

He needs to talk to Mozzie.

He hasn't talked to Mozzie in years. Since the day he got caught, when Mozzie warned him away from Kate. Mozzie has a good instinct for a trap. Mozzie would probably not approve of him turning himself in.

Unless he would, and it feels like he _would_ , which makes _no_ sense because Peter is FBI, and to people in Neal's world, the FBI are dangerous; so, Peter here is a dangerous man, and Neal here is the criminal who's broken into his private residence. But that's here, and Neal feels like he should be somewhere else, some different situation. Like he's dreaming all of this, and the noise outside the house, and all the reasons it seemed like the right thing to do.

He raises both hands, slowly, to chest-height, a _stop_ gesture, a gesture saying _hold on – just hold on_. Peter's attention shifts. The cuffs go back to his belt, he shows both hands –  _not going to hurt you_ – and takes a step forward.

"Let me see your wrists."

Neal doesn't move. His sleeves have pulled back on his forearms, and Peter reaches out and takes his arms by the unbroken skin just above the wrist.

"Someone's already cuffed you," he says.

Neal looks down. There are two rings of skin scraped raw on his wrists, and he feels like that was something he should have noticed before now.

Like the sirens. He should have noticed when they were blocks away, not when they were here. Police sirens, outside the window. A silhouette. Neal's looking down at his wrists, not out the window, but he can see it all the same; recognize the stance and the stature and the lines of the suit and the hair and the jaw, and Peter steps up to see what's going on, and Neal lashes out blind. His elbow catches the window behind the couch, and at that touch it explodes into a shower of glass; Peter ducks, the night rushes in, and–

* * *

(   )

The sirens are a block and a half away and the glass is on the other side of the street, some lanky kid – drunk or angry or something – with a beer bottle in hand, and another shattered against a corrugated-steel door, constellations of streetlights and neon _Closed_ signs that shatter on the debris. One other piece of life out here – New York City is the City that Never Sleeps, but all the way out here, on a night like this, it's huddled up somewhere. Neal shrinks back into the shadow of one of the auto shops, then curses himself and then finds his breath falling over itself in the back of his throat. His chest hurts and he can't breathe, and when he goes to his knees and pushes his palm into the wet concrete his gasping breaths sound way too close to someone losing control.

The second bottle smashes into the pavement and Neal pulls himself together as much as he can, though there are still sharp edges poking through his suit and grinding against each other. He stands, and lurches toward the only other human presence in his immediate world.

"Hey. Kid! _Kid!_ "

The kid jumps and looks at him and Neal stumbles halfhazardly into his space, stealing all the info he can get his hands on. Boy's young, hard to tell in the low light but not white one way or another; hoodie, baggy pants, the kind of person the police must love to pick on. The kind of person who's learned not to trust police. He backs up, which part of Neal finds hysterical in a breathless, terrified way – he's never looked like the police, now less than ever.

"The fuck," the kid says.

"It's all right," Neal says, showing his hands in a jerky sort of motion that makes the kid tense up until he sees that Neal's unarmed. "Just all right," he says again, and thinks fast, and mostly in little disoriented circles.

He doesn't know how to fight. Hopes he can talk his way out of this one. It's a blind grab, which isn't his usual style, but he's not thinking straight; he's not _thinking – thinking_ isn't going to get him out of this; _thinking_ barely gets him from one lucid moment to another.

"Jesus, man," the kid hisses, keeping out of range – out of knifing range, probably; Neal can't follow it that far. "You are _messed up_."

"Police are looking for someone like you," Neal lies. No preamble. He doesn't know how long he'll be able to hold on to this reality. "Shooting in the construction over on Avenue F, but I can tell you're not carrying; I can help. They've blocked off a couple of these streets, but I can get you out of here. I just need something."

Okay, now the kid looks freaked. The bits of half-truth sell it; there were bullets fired, and the police are out in force. Kid probably knows it. "I don't do drugs, man," he says. "I ain't got nothing to sell you."

On another day, he'd be affronted. Today, it just takes the wind out of him. "I don't need drugs," he says. "I need a phone."

"What?" the kid demands.

"A phone," Neal presses. "I get you out of here, you give me your phone. I'll _buy_ your phone. That's it. Is that okay?"

He can feel it fraying, feel the kid looking for an out, but another police car follows the route of the earlier one and saves him. The kid reaches for his pocket, touching the bulge of a phone there like he's weighing its value.

The value of these things always comes to _less than freedom._

"I don't know _nothing_ about no shooting," the kid mutters. "I came out to – you know, I met up with some friends, we had a few drinks – Ally's dad has a shop, man, that's all. We were just having some drinks in the shop and I left. I didn't shoot no one."

"I believe you," Neal says, and cases the alley in a second. _If I were running, if I needed to get away..._ "This way."

He loses a little time, there.

There's rain hammering at a window and he comes back to his mouth forming words like _cops on the payroll_ and _know what they'll do, you know, there's always the threat of solitary_ , and his hands are easing a door open and for a moment he's staring into the long, crowded hold of a U-boat. He wrenches himself back with a choked-off sob and finds himself standing in an auto shop with a feeling that he hasn't made it back all the way. He can see himself darting forward into the darkness like he's not lodged completely in his skull; hear himself talking without choosing what to say, or understanding what he's saying.

 _Crap_ , he thinks, and that's not strong enough. _Shit. Merde. Putain._

He is completely losing it.

"–always have back exits," he's saying. "The fire escape. You get up that, all of these buildings north of here–"

"Yeah, yeah, my cousin smokes joints up there," the kid says. "They looking for a shooter, they not gonna check up there?"

Neal breaks into hacking laughter.

"Why would they?" he asks, after a moment. "They've got the streets covered."

He's never been a believer in the NYPD's imagination.

"This is some joox shit," the kid mutters, and shoves his phone into Neal's hands. "Fuck, man, just take it; I ain't supposed to have that anyway. I'm gone."

The kid slips out the door and down the alley, and Neal turns over the phone in his hands. The instinct is to grin – celebrate a victory, however partial, however piecemeal – but when he starts to grin he forgets why he was grinning, and the phone is cool and foreign in his hands.

Part of him thinks, _no_ , and part of him yanks his head up at the sound of feet just outside; going, going–

 _Focus._ He pulled off the con. _Next step._ He's got a phone in his hands.

Phone in his hands and an ache in his skull and he's completely, completely nowhere.


	7. Abandon

(   )

There's a phone tapping against his forehead.

It takes Neal a while to realize that. Separate the physical sense of the phone bumping his skin from the aural quality of rain on the pavement. When he separates that, he still has to bring the phone down to eye level, stare at it in his hand, work through how it got there and what it's meant to be doing, now. Then he flips it open and stares at its indicators – two bars, a sliver of battery – and the jumble of numbers and letters on the buttons.

 _Think._ There's a reason for this. There's a way he can use this to his advantage.

What is it?

A car rumbling down the street outside startles him, gets him scrambling back into the dark recesses of the garage and huddling there, frozen except for the shivering. He remembers running, remembers fear, remembers–

_Oh. Right._

He needs to call Peter.

Mozzie likes to lament that these days, no one remembers their friends' numbers. They trust it all to contact lists and smartphones, as if the technology can't be lost, stolen, hacked, or turned against you. Anyone Mozzie has trained knows better; gets an encyclopedic memory for numbers and addresses, trains in muscle memory for anyone they might need to contact until they can dial blindfolded, drunk, without feeling in their thumbs, and strung up by their ankles over a sharkpit.

Neal is mostly not any of those things, but dials anyway.

The phone barely has a chance to ring before the other end picks up, sounding wound-up and short-tempered. _"Peter Burke."_

The speed takes Neal by surprise. Jars what little forethought he'd scraped together right out of his mind. He opens his mouth, but can't remember what he was supposed to be saying – _Hey_ , maybe; maybe there's details on the case that he needs to share, but what was he working on, a moment ago?

He'd been looking for Kate. Peter didn't approve of him looking for Kate.

There's a palpable sense of annoyance from somewhere, and it wanders back into Neal's awareness that on the other end of the line, Peter is dealing with a missing-or-fled consultant and probably a Bureau manhunt and now an unknown caller from an unknown number who's just breathing into the phone. His voice gets sharper faster than Neal's ever heard it. _"This is Special Agent Peter Burke, FBI. Who is this?"_

Words don't come.

In the background he hears – or thinks he hears – someone saying _start a trace_ , thinks he hears the black strap of tension humming out of the interference on the line.

"No police," he says, and feels a yellow snap of surprise lash out and catch him, factory-direct from the phone to his brain. Bright florescent lights, bland Bureau walls, and if it weren't for the pounding in his head he could believe he was there now; the faint background scent of Bureau coffee and paper files and some clerk's leftover lunch, Chinese and deli sandwiches for the agents working late, and the salt of the sea. Salt of the sea and a storm breeze. Sirens.

 _"Neal?"_ Peter says.

"No police," he repeats.

_"Neal, where the hell–"_

He's gone.

* * *

(iii)

"–the hell do you think you're going with that?"

Neal stops and turns. Wind and rain are whipping over the balustrade, and he's holding something – he looks down, and sees a box of flares in his hands; yellow-and-black striped box, with **CAUTION** in big, bold letters across it. He looks up again. "Mozzie, now really isn't a good time."

"You're setting off a flare in the middle of a thunderstorm," Mozzie says, and blusters up to him. A moment later he's jerking the box out of Neal's hands, tossing it down onto a table, turning back to him. "Leaving aside the absolute futility of that, you think you can just send up a flare and Peter will see it before Collins will? You know Collins is on the island!"

"He's not looking for a flare," Neal says. Mozzie doesn't buy that.

"You think the NYPD doesn't know how to trace a call?"

"NYPD." Neal seizes on that. "That _is_ who's after me? It's the NYPD?"

"It doesn't matter!" Mozzie is working himself into a state, now. "What matters is that you're only safe as long as you're off the radar. This–" he gesticulates over the flare box, " _is not staying off the radar_!"

"I can't just hide forever and hope everything will work itself out without me," Neal snaps, reaching for the flare box. "I have to do something."

"Yeah. _Something._ Not this." Mozzie interposes himself between Neal and the box, spreading his hands. "Neal, you have to listen to me. _I'm_ the one keeping you safe, here. The Suit might have wanted you to run, but when you ran, you came to me. Do you remember that? The Suit can't protect you!"

"Then what do you want me to do?" Neal demands. "You said we had to find Peter. If we get to Peter, we can end this."

"I remember telling you to _find_ Peter, not make it really obvious where you were hiding."

"Well, what do you suggest?" Neal's temper spikes. "I already broke into his house! It didn't help."

Mozzie stills, as much as he ever stills; he's got that look on his face, the one he put on when Neal told him he'd told Kate the stash was in San Diego, the one he put on when Neal told him he had the art manifest. "This is about that, isn't it? You still feel bad because I had you break into the Suit family safe."

"What?"

"Neal, I have only ever tried to help you," Mozzie says. Neal's not too angry for that to hurt, but it doesn't hurt enough to drown out the anger.

"I know that," he says. And he does. But it's not the point, and it's not–

"I know you think this isn't helping," Mozzie says, and turns around to pick up the flares. "But it has to be done. Now. We need to ditch this, and–"

And the flare box buzzes. Mozzie drops it.

Both of them step back, eyeing it with fear. Neal looks to Mozzie, then crouches down – carefully, carefully – and eases the lid open. The box is empty but for one thing.

Brown paper, German lettering. Sawdust soaked in nitroglycerine, formed into sticks, wrapped into a bundle, stashed carefully away as on a German sub.

Dynamite.

* * *

(i)

"Neal," Adler says, and the sirens outside have gone silent but are still flashing bright. The night breeze is soaking-cold, the glass spread across the livingroom like an early, brutal frost, and behind him, Peter reaches for his gun.

* * *

(   )

_"Neal,"_ Peter says, and Neal startles. His fingertips are numb, and something is biting into his palm. After a moment he realizes it's a phone. _"Don't hang up."_

He swallows, two or three times. "Yeah."

_"We're tracing the call now to get a read on your location. We can't do that if you hang up again. You understand me?"_

_You think the NYPD can't trace a phone?_

"Yeah," he says. "I understand you."

Peter exhales. _"Start telling me what happened."_

* * *

(iii)

"You weren't there," Neal says. "You didn't see it happen."

"This again?" Mozzie asks, hands splayed over the dynamite as though he can keep it calm. "You're talking about Kate and the plane." Then, when Neal doesn't confirm that, "You're talking about the U-boat."

Neal doesn't agree or disagree.

"I had your back on that," Mozzie says.

"You almost got me blown up, shot by Adler, and arrested by Peter," Neal says. "And then you tried to bully me into choosing between my life in New York and my friendship with you."

"I shared the score of a century with you," Mozzie says. His voice is angry, hurt. Same things Neal is feeling; almost the same reasons. Like they're the same person. "The Neal I knew – the Neal I worked with, for all those years – he would have been happy." Something occurs to him. "You _were_ happy."

"No. I wasn't," Neal says.

"Yes, you were." Mozzie's hands land on the flare-box lid, the dynamite forgotten. "You could have backed out at any time, and I would have gone and fenced the treasure without you. But you were in it. You didn't say 'No'. You said, 'We take our time, we do this right.' And don't think I didn't see the look on your face when you walked into a warehouse piled high with art and jewels!"

That's wrong. That isn't right at all. "You weren't there."

"Neal, I'm _you_!" Mozzie yells.

Feels like he's on the run, again. Backed into a corner, no way out, no way through. Alone. "Then why are we doing this?"

"You know why Kate left you?" Mozzie demands. "Why – why you and Alex will never get together? Why Peter still doesn't trust you, why Sara broke up with you?" He's working himself up into a declamation, now. "Because you don't know how to tell the truth. You only know how to tell people what they want to hear, and I get that. I'm the only person in your _life_ who does."

"Okay – stop," Neal says, and reaches for the dynamite. He doesn't know if they bluffed with wires sixty years ago, and hasn't bothered to find out; Mozzie would be disappointed in him, if he knew. _Know everything._ But he'd had bigger things to worry about, and then it hadn't mattered, and then they were running. Running in place, mostly. But running.

"You know what this is about?" Mozzie asks.

"I don't care," Neal says. He needs something sharp. Wire cutters, preferably. Anything that cuts. Scissors, a knife, a reciprocating saw. "I need to focus. Stop talking."

"No. I won't stop talking." Mozzie is still standing above him. "You backed yourself into a corner because for once in your life, you couldn't have everything you wanted, and you had to make a choice. That's why you're upset. You couldn't choose between the score, and New York."

"Don't," Neal warns.

"You couldn't choose between the score and Adler," Mozzie presses on. "New York and Kate. You always want to have it all, and then you choke, and–"

" _Stop_ ," Neal says.

"Yeah, well," Mozzie says, "we can't all be Neal Caffrey." He stands. "Some of us have to sacrifice to get what we want. Some of us sacrifice a lot to help _you_ get what you want! You dragged your heels until Keller came looking for the treasure, and we had to hand over almost everything – and after all that, I still got you out of New York when your fed friends couldn't give you the life you deserved, and after all that, you're still blaming _me_ for what happened?"

The dynamite is ticking. "No, Mozzie, no, I don't blame you–"

"Yeah. _Well_ ," Mozzie says again; not so much words as a verbal roadblock, cutting off that bridge. "I still have your back. Whether or not you want it."

 _Midas_ , Neal thinks. Died of hunger because he wished for riches beyond compare. Couldn't eat gold. There's no Enigma, here, no keyboard to accept his answer, and the dynamite is counting down to something.

He looks up at Mozzie. "Why?"

Mozzie is watching him. "You know why," he says.

* * *

(   )

"I don't know why," Neal says, and startles. There's no dynamite, but there's an auto-shop door and a counter and a tire display, and he hadn't meant to say that out loud. Or, he had, but not into the phone, not–

The battery is dead, the line silent and empty.

Outside, the wind is picking up.

"I don't know," Neal repeats, into the silence. Then he eases himself up, testing the environment, ready to duck if anyone levels a gun at him. He eases to the door and presses his ear against the metal, holding his rough breath in his chest; _one, two, three,_ and over the hammering of his heart, he can hear noise on the street.

_I don't know._

_Know everything._

Here's what he knows:

He's alone.

He's somewhere in a neighborhood without a lot of night traffic, but with a police presence which may or may not be looking for him. He's cold, injured, and hallucinating, not thinking clearly. He's called Peter, and Peter knows he's in trouble, and Peter is looking for him. He's not on his anklet. He's been running.

Here's what he _doesn't_ know:

Whether the trace was completed; whether Peter knows how to find him.

Whether whoever's hunting him knows.

How long he's been crouching in this auto shop; what kinds of hours the shop owner keeps, what hour it is, whether the shop has a silent alarm.

How long he's going to last, blacking out and coming to, stumbling on an injured leg and with no idea when was the last time he's slept, drunk, eaten.

How easy it'll be to pick him off the moment he's detained by anyone.

How easy he'll be to detain.

There aren't a lot of things you can trust in this world, and of the things you can trust, you have to know how far they're trustable. Right now, he's willing to trust Peter to the limits of FBI-capable response and human endurance; trouble is, he's been on the run for a long time, and he knows how far back those limits can keep a person. The NYPD is thick on the ground, and instinct says not to get caught, and instinct has gotten him this far.

His instinct says, _run._

He runs.


	8. Checkmate

(   )

He hits the real world like the surface of the ocean, and it floods in to drown him. For a second, he doesn't inhale.

A siren has started up, far too close for comfort. Another joins it from another way, two voices howling in the night. Hounds for the hare. Neal has to wonder where the pack is.

He doesn't let himself stop to consider it.

There's a place that looks plausible up ahead; abandoned construction site, plenty of high ground, plenty of low hideaways, perches, escape routes, obstacles. He's three steps toward the street where the streetlights spill red over the asphalt, brighter than blood and just as disrupted by the rain.

The lights one street down are beating as fast as his heart.

Every flash is like a glancing blow, and the car swings onto the street to come towards him. Neal backs away.

Another way. There's always another way.

He backtracks two buildings and slips around the side as the sirens slip by, then changes his angle. This is a bad position, nowhere to hide, and the best place to get to is across a long expanse of parking lot. Fool's gambit, _nothing ventured_ –

He skids around the corner, and he feels the headlights like a pedestrian-car collision.

_Shot to the chest. Three moves to checkmate._

He turns, sees the searing red flash of another car, turns again, darts rabbit-quick into the open while the automotive hounds run to rout him. Makes it over a parking stop and there's the scream of lights again, searing across his vision, cutting him off.

_I'm dead, I'm dead, I'm dead, two moves to checkmate–_

He turns. He's trapped in a circle of lights, complete 911-call with backup; squad cars are pouring into the lot from two entrances, all howling aggression. Doors snapping open like walls coming up to cage him. Policemen all ready to kill.

One of them, at least.

"Get on the ground! Hands where we can see them!"

He puts his hands out, open and empty. One of these men has a bullet with his name on it, and on a dark, stormy night with a baker's dozen guns, things can escalate quickly. For some people, all you need is confusion, and that's the motive to kill.

Neal has confusion in spades.

_One move._

"On the ground! _Down_!" A dozen voices, a cacophony of sound. It's meant to demoralize and disorient, and it's a bit redundant, here. He's lowering himself to one knee, scrabbling for chances among the guns and the lights, the squeal of more car tires, and the tension prickling along the back of his neck and spiking between his shoulderblades. There's a rising pressure between his lungs that makes it hard to breathe, makes him want to spring from this awkward half-crouch like a runner from the starting line, run–

And then, behind him, over his shoulder, a familiar voice calls, "FBI!"

And the pressure goes out of him like the punch of a pneumatic hammer, and he hits the deck.

The cavalry is here, but despite his instinct telling him to duck and cover, there aren't any bullets flying yet. Instead there's footsteps – heavy, authoritative – and the rain-dim smell of the parking lot concrete beneath him, rough against his hands.

"The man you have surrounded there is a confidential informant for the FBI," Peter calls out, in his best _Shut-up-I-outrank-you_ voice. It's a pretty impressive voice, but all Neal notices is that it's _here_. He's pretty sure it's here. "He's unarmed; potentially injured. I'm going to need all of you to stand down."

There's palpable confusion, at that, but Neal has to fight a grin. He doesn't even know why he's grinning, except that he's not dead, not dead, not dead.

Peter's backup moves – quickly, efficiently, gotta love that FBI discipline – to secure the place, and Neal stands, though stiffly. Peter heads to Neal's side, and one of the police officers meets him there. Peter looks at Neal, then doubletakes at him, and then turns back to the police officer without – mercifully – commenting on the state of Neal's anything.

"Agent," the officer says. "We got a call that some guy was running around here, completely wired. If he's in possession of narcotics–"

"He's not," Peter says. "He's one of ours."

The policeman looks dubious. Neal tries to give him a reassuring smile.

"I'll talk with your supervising officer to get everything straightened out. We'll take it from here," Peter says, and lands a hand on Neal's shoulder to steer him away. Presumably before he can convince anyone else from New York's Finest that he's on drugs. And before any of them can shoot him.

The lot is crowded with agents and officers; all the lights going off, from the blue-and-white squad cars and the unmarked black cruisers and the ambulance stopped just outside the phalanx, are enough to make Neal's brain jitter. In contrast to Peter's hand, Neal's shoulder – and the rest of him – feels like it's vibrating more than it needs to be. Even things that should be solid, like the ground, are more of a vague impression than anything; the night feels like if the rain picked up, it'd all fall down.

A few paces away and Peter stops walking; Neal almost keeps going until Peter's hand tightens and stops him. He turns, and Peter is staring him down, and he feels like _now_ is the time when Peter is going to bring up that he looks like a drowned rat that the cat dragged in.

"Once we had the trace, you should have held tight. Not gone haring off to scare the NYPD. What _happened_?" Peter asks, and in comparison to his inter-Law-Enforcement-Agency tone of calm, this voice is quiet but turned up to eleven. "It's been fourteen hours since your tracker went dark."

Neal takes a deep breath, ready to start explaining.

"–I think there was something with a backhoe," he hears himself saying.

Peter's eyes narrow. He doesn't look amused, which would be fine, except Neal wasn't trying to be amusing. He scrambles for something else to say.

"No. I–" He can't actually remember what he was doing before all of this began. Or, rather, he's sure he can remember, but the memory is buried under a heap of broken images and he doesn't know where to begin sifting through them. "We got separated. I think something happened to Kate–"

" _Kate_?" Peter interrupts. "Neal, Kate is dead."

A spear of annoyance goes through him. "I know that," he says. Peter thinks he doesn't know that? "I know. But she went missing. I broke out to find her, but Adler knew I was out. He was coming after me."

Peter just gapes, and then clamps a hand onto Neal's forehead with all the subtlety of an arresting officer clicking on cuffs. "Jesus, Neal," he swears. "You're running a hell of a fever. You're probably hallucinating–"

A wash of relief floods through Neal. _He gets it._ "Yes," he agrees, probably too eager. "Yes. I am. I mean, I was. So we have to find out who Kate was, and where she is now. And listen, Collins had a three-man team–"

" _Collins_?" Peter asks.

"–and I think he's a cop," Neal finishes. "You can't let me get in that ambulance." _If they cuff me, I'm dead._

"You're going to an ER," Peter says. "That is not negotiable."

"He's a _cop_ ," Neal stresses, and grabs for Peter's lapels. It takes a couple tries to find them. "Peter, I couldn't contact you because getting to a phone meant going somewhere where someone might see me and call the _cops_." He takes in a breath, and his lungs try to seize up. He doesn't let them. "I don't think I'm wrong about this."

 _You were just talking about your dead boss and dead girlfriend in present tense,_ Peter's expression rather eloquently says.

Neal scrambles for something, and hits on it. "You can protect me." It works, it _fits_ , it's _brilliant_ , and he plunks a finger into Peter's sternum. "If I turn myself in to you."

Peter scrutinizes his face. "You are making even less sense than usual, Neal; that's a bad sign."

"You can take me in," Neal says.

Peter stares at him for a moment longer, then surrenders to the situation. "Yeah, okay." He turns away. "Jones! Diana!"

From out of the milling mass of people, the two named shapes emerge. Neal eyes them as they come close – apparitions in black, somehow no more real or solid than the night or the island.

"What do you need?" Diana asks.

"Keep an eye on things, here," Peter says. "I'm driving Neal to Lenox Hill. Get whatever marshals have his new anklet to meet me there." He drops his voice. "Listen, one of the cops here may be implicated in what went down tonight. Get names and badge numbers, and keep an eye out for anything suspicious."

Jones looks from him to Neal, and back again. "We'll take care of it," he says.

"Thanks," Peter says, and takes Neal by the arm. Guides him through the black, slick rain to the black, rain-slicked car, opens the door for him, and hangs at his elbow while he puts himself in. Neal doesn't pay a lot of attention as Peter closes the door and goes around to the driver's side; he pulls on his seatbelt when Peter says, "Seatbelt," and then he just puts his head back and tries to get his inner ear to understand what's happening as they pull out of the lot and onto the street.

Everything is swimming, which is good, because below that, there's a foggy sense that everything hurts. His head is thrumming, his ankle stings and aches, and his chest feels too tight, but if the pain tries to push him out of his head, he can slip out and come back later. It's comforting to have options.

He breathes in, just to hear himself do it. Just to place one more mark on the sliding scale of his reality. Peter glances over at him, and it seems like he's expected to say something, so he says "I'm sorry I broke into your house, Peter." And he is. He really is.

"I'm sure it'll all be – wait," Peter says. "When did you break into my house?"

He tries to remember. "When Adler was after me. After I broke out of prison." The motion of the car is distracting; rain on the windshield, brake lights, green lights. He's not used to having trust, not the kind you don't snatch with a con, and he's discovering that without the con in place, betraying that trust no longer feels like the cost of doing business. "Thanks."

There's an uneasy silence, like Peter is gauging his sanity. "For what?"

"Not cuffing me," Neal says. "Taking me in."

"Yeah," Peter says, like he doesn't get why he's being thanked for this. "No problem."

They stop at a few red lights, and Peter hasn't put the lights on in the windshield, so he can't think Neal's in that much danger. But after some time and the lulling sense of motion, he says, as though from a great distance, "You still with me?"

"Mm," Neal says, listening to the thunder rolling across the skyline. Peter has the car heater on, and between that and Neal's soaked-through clothes, it makes the night warm and humid. Eighty degrees, he thinks. Dead of night.

"Talk to me," Peter says.

"I wonder what time it is in New York right now," Neal answers, and drifts away.


	9. Found

(ii)

It's just past dawn in the Seychelles.

The sky is still dripping, and the entire landscape looks soggy, but the clouds have thinned and a gray, diffuse light is seeping through. Neal is walking through the cottage, and stops when he hears something outside – light, pensive footsteps, Kate, maybe, but when he throws open the shutters, no one is there. It hurts. More than he was expecting.

But in his mind is an image of Kate walking alone along the shore, a study in dove-grays, with her hair a bold note marrying the breeze. He could paint that, a dozen times over.

_She sells sea shells in the Seychelles._

He's got almost the whole composition worked out when he hears a strange, lopsided jumble of beeping, like the overflow of sound in a hospital hallway. It's their emergency burner – one of those habits Mozzie instilled in him. Always have a safehouse. Always have one way of getting a message out that no one else knows about. Always have your options.

He follows it through the cottage into the livingroom, where a trunk has been stashed in the corner. In the trunk, under his art supplies and Kate's first editions, under the false bottom that conceals just enough space for a phone and some cash and a handful of things only made valuable by sentiment, the burner is still ringing. Neal flips it open.

"Hello?"

And theres a familiar voice on the other end: _"Hello, Neal."_

"Kate." Even after so long, her name brings a warm rush up his chest. He suspects that this will always be a part of him; an entire world wrapped up in that sound, paved over by time and circumstance and the best and worst intentions, but still indelible. He's smiling before he knows whether or not he has a reason to. "Where are you?"

 _"That doesn't matter, now,"_ she says.

"Yes, it does," he says, and the smile fades. "Kate, listen – I have a way out, for us." He pauses, waits for a reaction, then forges on. "We can go home. Back to New York. If you turn yourself in to Peter, he'll protect you; I know he will. He's a good man."

 _"It's too late for that,"_ Kate says, and Neal's throat closes up.

"Why?"

 _"Neal,"_ she says, _"you ever think Mozzie's maybe right about all this? We're con artists. Maybe we just don't get happy endings."_

"No." The response is hard, automatic. "I don't believe that. Not for a second."

_"Really?"_

"Really." He walks to the window, grips the sill. "Kate, please. I know we left it on a bad–"

 _Note._ The word doesn't come. Outside the window there's an airstrip, an explosion, and it's gone. In his peripheral vision Mozzie is picking his way through the twisted, blackened wreckage of a plane, but Neal's alone, and Neal knows he's alone.

He knows exactly where he is.

"Mozzie," Neal says, into the phone. "I thought I got out of here."

 _"The Suit is capable of many things, my friend,"_ Mozzie's voice says, over the line. The absence of Kate is a silence that gapes wider than the ocean outside. _"I think you have to save yourself from yourself, though."_

"I don't need saving from myself." His fingers tighten on the phone. " _You_ would never say I needed that."

 _"Hey, I'm just reading from the script, here,"_ Mozzie says. _"If you don't like what it says, try therapy. I can lend you Percy. Yes, he may be just a rat, but I find his understanding of the finer nuances of human psychological states, without judging–"_

Neal hangs up.

Then he takes a step back from the window, winds up, and throws the phone out through it. The glass shatters and the phone arcs impossibly far, vanishing against the backdrop of the waves.

* * *

(iii)

One of the things Neal never knew about the Seychelles was that if you walked far enough, out along the beach, you'd wind up at a villa in Cape Verde. He considers just walking past, and makes it down to the beach where he used to run before his momentum stalls out. Another sea, another sky, another place to not call home.

He stands there and watches the clouds thin out, wondering if the rain is letting up in New York, until footsteps crunch across the rocky sand toward him.

Neal doesn't look to see who it is. He knows who it is.

"Hell of a thing, being able to retire to a place like this," Peter says, offering him a bottle of wine – screw-top – with no glass. Neal can't help but smile as he takes it.

"Tried it, once. Didn't work out," he says. "How did you manage to marry the most successful startup event planner in the greater New York area and come away without a single pretension to class?"

"Just lucky, I guess," Peter says, though his smile is fond. He and Elizabeth complement each other, in that sense where _complement_ is like _complete_ , in the way Neal wishes he could have complimented Kate, and Kate went a long way toward complementing him. "If you wanted, I could have grabbed the Bordeaux bottle from your place–"

"No," Neal says, too quickly, then covers it with a chuckle. "No; let's leave the Bordeaux alone. I think it's run its course."

"Hm," Peter says. Now his smile is self-satisfied, like he's just cracked a case. Neal squints at him.

"How did you find me?"

Peter glances at him. "How do I ever?"

"Well, the first two times, you found Kate," Neal says. "This time..."

"I knew you," Peter says.

Neal raises an eyebrow. "That predictable, am I?"

"Maybe I'm just that good." Peter looks past him, back in the direction Neal had come from. "I thought you'd let go of Kate."

Neal gives a short, bitter laugh, and looks out over the ocean. The Indian Ocean, the Central Atlantic; they both toss their waves on the shore, and they both give the illusion of encircling the world. "Yeah. So had I."

"But it's not that easy," Peter finishes for him.

"No."

He unscrews the winebottle, and takes a sniff. It smells antiseptic, and he grimaces.

"When Kate and I met. When I was working for Adler," he says. "I got pretty close to having everything I wanted. I didn't have to worry about money. I was doing something challenging. Important. At least, it felt important. People cared about what I thought – people cared about me. And even if I wasn't _with_ Kate, I was still with her, you know? She was there." He breathes out. "Except, I was living a lie." He turns to look at Peter, gauge his reaction. "I think sometimes living a lie is the only way to get what you want."

Peter should probably spout a platitude, at this point; argue morality, offer some kind of reassurance that will come across as slightly too wholesome for the reality Neal knows. Instead, he tilts his head, looking at Neal sidelong. "Why are you telling me this?"

Neal gestures with the bottle to his temple. "Because this is all in my mind. None of it is real."

 _Ah_ , Peter mouths. Then, with a glance out to the ocean, "You know, you can always talk to me."

Neal looks at the sand beneath his shoes. "Yeah. Yeah, you've mentioned that a couple of times."

"Then why don't you ever take me up on it?"

Neal turns to look at him, framed by the Atlantic and the clearing sky. "I have," he says. "More than you know."

"Less than I'd like," Peter counters. Neal makes a small _heh_ noise.

"Well, we can't all be Peter Burke, pathologically incapable of not telling the truth."

He takes another drink. Mozzie would probably have a field day with the symbolism of him needing hallucinated alcohol to get through a hallucinated conversation with his hallucinated protector,-father-figure,-partner,-handler,-buddy-or- _whatever_ -Peter-is-at-this-point, but Neal chooses not to examine it too carefully.

"You know," he says, "I could have been really happy, here."

And to that, Peter just says, "Nah."

That irks him. Just once, he'd appreciate it if his hallucinations would agree with him. "I could have."

"You like being chased, Neal." Peter makes a grand gesture out across the waves. He's acquired a beer, sometime when Neal wasn't looking. At least his hallucinated friends need alcohol for this conversation, too. "You like having people to outwit. Sometimes, I think you even like being caught."

Neal raises an eyebrow.

"Lets you know you're appreciated," Peter says.

Neal is startled into laughing. "Yeah," he says. "Yeah, because getting a felony conviction is just as good as a medal or an honorary degree."

"It did get you into the FBI," Peter points out.

"Route less recommended," Neal mutters.

"Yeah," Peter agrees, with a laugh. It is a joke, Neal supposes – joke on him, joke on the world, joke on the people who make the rules and the people who live by breaking them. The waves come in, the waves go out, and Peter sweeps out a hand. "You want to go home?"

Neal takes one last look around the island, then down at the wine in his hand. Given more time, he could finish the wine, clean out the bottle, and there are lots of things you can do with bottles – build a ship, send a message. But he doesn't need to. Cape Verde, like the Bordeaux, has run its course.

"Yeah," he says, and turns his back to the ocean. "I think I do."

He walks past Peter, and Peter puts a hand on his shoulder as he goes by.

* * *

The absence of a headache when he wakes up is almost as distracting as the headache itself was.

It's too much an absence of everything – like there's a warm fog where the sense of his body should be, and a curious sense of bobbing ease where there should be flight-or-flight fear. It's not unpleasant, but it's gone 'round the other side of pleasant and come out at odd.

He blinks and moves his hand, then his head; the world floats into sense around him: the institutional robins-egg blue of a hospital room, a curtain pushed to one side, light streaming in, and Peter at the window with his back to him, chatting into a phone.

Neal looks down. He's not strapped to anything, though there's an IV going into one arm. A glance up the tubing tells him that whatever they've been draining into him – saline and an antibiotic, it looks like – has mostly drained into him, and thus the IV itself is probably not important for his continued survival.

It'd be difficult – Peter has a decent set of ears on him – but not totally impossible to disentangle himself and slip away.

Not that he wants to. But it's nice to know the option's there.

"Any chance that's Elizabeth?" he croaks, and grimaces almost immediately. He can taste a chemical tang and stale spit all the way back to his throat, and has to swallow a couple times to get his voice back to something that should come out of a person.

Peter turns back from the window, raises his eyebrows, and looks genuinely happy to see him. "Jones," he says, covering the phone's mic with one hand. "They said they hoped you'd be awake soon. How're'ya feeling?"

"Like I got hit by a bulldozer," Neal says, but makes his tone as chipper as it can be. His throat is still scratchy, and he feels like he's not quite all there. "You brought work?"

"Just wrapping things up," Peter says. "You're kinda messing up my Sunday, Neal."

"Is it Sunday already?" Neal asks. It does make sense. He has a vague recollection of planning to meet up with someone on Friday, get a lead – nothing time-sensitive – that they could follow up on the next week; quick little stop in the park before heading home for the weekend.

And then... and then.

Yeah. Okay, so he supposes he _has_ kinda messed the weekend up.

Peter says something into the phone, then hangs up and comes to stand by the bed. "Glad you decided to join us back in reality."

Neal groans. "I don't like this reality." He moves his arm, and the cool plastic of the IV moves over his skin. "I prefer the ones where I'm not–" He shakes his elbow, watching the vibration propagate up the tube. "–hooked to things."

"You scared a few doctors. Give it a while."

For some reason, that makes him grin.

Reality feels soft and a little distant, and there's a a sneaking feeling of exhaustion that seems like it's ebbed out and may yet flow back in like a tide. He leans back into the pillows, shifts his weight, and–

"Whoa," he says, and moves his leg again. "Tracker's on the wrong foot."

"Well, your usual leg had to get nineteen stitches, and the doctor was very insistent we not let your anklet chafe." Peter is casing the room; after a second, he locates the side chair and starts hauling it over to the bed. "That going to be a problem? I'm not going to catch you toppling over like a half-sheared sheep?"

Neal shoots him a glance. "I think I'll manage," he says. "...have I ever told you that your similes are a little concerning?"

"It's part of my folksy charm," Peter deadpans, and sits down at Neal's elbow. "You okay to talk?"

Well, _that's_ alarming. Neal shuffles through the words for hidden meaning, then says, "Why wouldn't I be?"

"You had a pretty rough night," Peter says, with that kind of careful diction that suggests he's using understatement as a guard against anything blowing up. "You weren't making a lot of sense when we found you. You kept talking about Kate and Adler and Collins."

Right. Those little slices of unreality, and Neal has the feeling that when Peter says _You scared a few doctors,_ he was trying not to say _You scared the hell out of all of us._ He wouldn't put it past Peter to assume that he was having some kind of stress-induced break from reality, the same way Peter had been watching a little too hard for him to crumble after the plane blew up. But this was the deal; life knocked you around, and you picked yourself up and survived it. And afterwards, you didn't fixate too much on how narrowly you had.

He plays it off like it's no big deal. "Yeah, well, I was also running a fever of–" Neal blinks, and leaves the rest of the sentence open like a blank line on a form. True to expectation, Peter fills it in.

"A hundred and three point six." Peter is still watching him too closely, if his drug-padded brain is reading that right. "Anything you want to talk about?"

Neal feels like he's already said everything he needs to. More than he needs to. Sure, Peter might not think it counts when it's been said to imaginary versions of him – or of _Mozzie_ – but what Peter doesn't know.

"The woman I was with," he says, instead. He fishes for a name, and one surfaces; one that isn't _Kate_. "Angela."

"We tracked her down," Peter says. "She was shaken up, but they didn't get to her. She went to ground even faster than you did."

Neal chuckles. "Well, to be fair, she has more experience being a CI who's allowed to do that sort of thing."

Didn't need his rescue, after all.

A smile prickles Peter's expression. "Well, you didn't do _so_ badly."

"Old habits," Neal says. "The cop–?"

"Sergeant Richard Dean. Diana caught him taking a call after we left. As it turns out, his pistol had a few bullets unaccounted-for." Peter shrugs one shoulder. "He flipped pretty quickly on Jack Barnes, who was–"

"Their forger," Neal says, and nods. "That's my Collins and Adler."

"The off-brand versions," Peter says, and Neal laughs. He's just about to relax into the banter when he notices that Peter is still watching him, even more a-little-too-closely.

"What?"

"We've already gotten Angela's statement. But. Do you remember anything about last night?"

An abortive stab of panic goes through him.

A few mumblings about Collins and Adler and Kate aside, there's no way Peter knows what was going on inside his head. No way.

And then it occurs to him that Peter is asking about the real world, and he feels like an idiot. "Angela and I were going to meet someone who knew who the forger was," he says, and the levity drops out of his voice. "They were operating out of one of the temporary buildings at the construction site on Avenue F–" Lines of CAT trucks, backhoes, shovels; yellow machinery and dug-up gray earth and an overcast sky; he can remember all these things, but not the actual scene; "–but we were meeting at Baretto Point Park." He exhales. "Then Dean and Barnes showed up. They must have had someone watching our contact. Things got nasty pretty fast. I tried to cover for Angela to run, they grabbed me, and – I lose a little time, there."

"We think that at some point you got a rag full of solvent," Peter says, and there's a dark, hard edge to his tone. "Traces of it around your mouth and nose."

That's... disturbing, and Neal doesn't bother to hide it. "I almost wish I didn't know that."

"It's what they had lying around," Peter says. "All right. They took you to the construction site. We can assume that at some point they realized you were wearing a tracker, and they couldn't just keep you around, so they cut your anklet with a sawzall, and they moved you. That's when we lost track of you." And that dark edge is _smoldering_ , now.

"...I almost wish I didn't know that, either." He starts drawing his injured foot up toward him, then catches what he's doing, and stops. Takes a deep breath, and... tries not to think of that. Peter watches him, like he's going to have to back off of that subject, and Neal coughs and tries to find a different one.

Peter finds one first. "How'd you get out?"

"I don't remember," Neal says, and then his wrists twitch. _Right._ "Cuffs. They had me in cuffs. I slipped them."

"And?"

"And I ran," Neal says. "It gets... jumbled, at that point." He's pretty sure he didn't end up in the Seychelles or on Cape Verde. Manhattan is less absurd, but still not terribly likely. "I think I made a run for the river."

"The river," Peter repeats. "The Bronx River."

"Concealing your tracks in a river is a time-honored method of evading escape," Neal says. Peter groans, and rolls his head back to look at the ceiling. "–what?"

"Nothing," Peter says, though his tone says, _God help me._ "It's just, I leave you alone for six blocks and two hours, and you start inhaling solvents, getting cuffed to things, and taking open wounds for dunks in the Bronx River."

"It seemed preferable to getting shot," Neal says, quietly.

Peter looks chastised, and waves it off. "Yeah."

Okay. That conversation took a turn.

Neal glances at the window, which offers him a completely generic view of the Upper East Side. If it's at all possible to avoid a serious conversation, he'd like to do that; he's had more serious conversations in the last howevermany hours than he'd budgeted for this week. The fact that a grand majority of them were with himself doesn't actually make that better.

Mostly, it makes him tired.

"They give you any idea when I'd be out of here?" he asks, though the way things are, he's not sure how he'd drag himself out of the bed, much less to his suite at June's. But Peter seems as eager to change the subject as Neal is.

"Shouldn't be long," he says. "They got you off supplemental oxygen this morning, and I gather that that was mostly a precaution. They want you on antibiotics and they'll have a laundry list of care instructions you need to follow, but you're not in any danger." He gives Neal a crooked grin. "You'll be back to work in no time."

Neal groans. "That's really not what I was asking."

"I know," Peter says. "Don't worry. You've earned a couple days off."

The light of day is bouncing off the buildings outside, and fatigue is lapping up the sides of his awareness again. Maybe no one will mind if he takes a quick nap before they release him. "I've earned it, have I?"

"Yeah," Peter says. "You did good."

He blinks in Peter's direction. "If that's your definition of 'good', the standards of the FBI have really–"

"Neal," Peter interrupts. Neal lets him. "You were feverish, slipping in and out of consciousness, and hallucinating, but you kept it together. You got yourself rescued." Peter's mouth quirks up into a thin half-smile. "And you didn't – I don't know. Run for France, or something."

 _I was already vacationing in the Tropics_ , Neal thinks. "Doesn't feel like much of an achievement."

"It was one."

Neal might have found something intelligent to say to that, but instead, he yawns.

When he blinks that away, Peter is looking at him with an expression that's slightly knowing, maybe a little fond. "Right," he says. "I'll see if I can catch someone's attention. You, relax, I guess."

"I thought that's what I've been doing."

"Do some more."

Peter's hand lands on his shoulder, and he stands.

"Sleep, Neal," Peter says, so Neal does.

– END –


End file.
